Still from Trisha Brown’s Planes (1968)
AGF is a powerful poemproducer. She first described herself in these terms on a track of that title from Westernization Completed, her Ars Electronica winning breakthrough album. Poemproducer became her “internet name,” and has come to stand in for her idiosyncratic approach to vocal-based electronic music. Last November, AGF quietly released Poemproducer, almost exactly 20 years after Westernization Completed. Channeling her internet name into her first proper solo studio album since SOLIDCITY (2017), Poemproducer is built around mutating bass, freeplayed rhythms, and subtle field recordings. We discuss the evolution of her musical practice, her interest in pedagogy, feminism, collective politics and much more. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Episode 35: DIS/CONTENT – with AGF
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Interview recorded Montreal and Hailuoto, November 2023
Produced and mixed in Montreal, March 2024
Antye Greie-Ripatti (née Greie-Fuchs) aka AGF is a sound artist, poet, and electronic music producer. Born in what was then East Germany, she moved to Berlin after the wall came down, where she developed her unique approach to production and performance, working with early computers, learning MIDI and making beats on an MPC, and especially developing her approach as a vocalist and poemproducer. She asked herself, “What actually can I do?” Coming from a country that no longer exists, out of sync with the contemporary and beginning her process of “westernization,” she turned to her voice, and discovered her artistic mission. “I’m trying to be as free as possible… this is my allegiance to art: to be as free as possible.”
It’s difficult to separate AGF from her origins in East Germany, and expressing her experience as an “Ossi” became an important aspect of her early work. She developed a DIY approach inspired by hip hop’s urban griots, and has ever since used her voice to fight against oppression, support marginalized communities, and call out injustice, be it gender imbalance in music festivals or elevating the voices of women in Rojava.
Beginning as the singer of the German band Laub in 1996, AGF has consistently made music that strives to break the rigid rhythmic grid of machine music, centering instead her voice and her body. This corporeal focus also allows her to explore broader social and political issues, experimenting with musical form and words to produce new language to resist cooptation. In addition to her solo work, AGF is also a frequent collaborator, including with her partner Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay, as AGF / Delay and RyJ), Craig Armstrong, Ellen Allien, and as part of the supergroup The Lappetites (alongside Éliane Radigue, Kaffe Matthews, and Ryoko Akama). Her collaborative spirit has also increasingly extended to various collective practices, including workshops and research projects.
AGF and Delay long since left Berlin and relocated to the island of Hailuoto in the north of Ripatti’s home country of Finland, a productive period for both producers, who have increasingly self-released their work, seemingly content to be out of sync with the cosmopolitan hype cycles. Touring tends to involve moving through relatively homogeneous urban spaces (airports, train stations, venues, hotels), so it shouldn’t be surprising that AGF has so often supplemented the urban festival circuit by searching out opportunities in rural contexts and throughout the global south. In addition to her work with female:pressure, a support community and promotional platform for female-identified electronic musicians, she has also developed Sonic Wilderness, feminist workshops that proceed from the presumption of freedom which AGF has organized in various contexts and countries.
Of a 2018 Sonic Wilderness workshop organized in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, AGF explains,
These interventions are inspired by Radical Mycology, a grassroots movement that examines network organization by looking at the decentralized growth and resilience of mycelial networks and Stacy Alaimo s feminist book: Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, which suggests: trans-corporeality as a way to view the relationship between humanity and the world around us as fluid
More recently, AGF has continued to explore sound and collective politics with Rec-on.org, a site launched in the early days of the 2020 pandemic as a “new space for political sound work and political listening.” As the initial announcement in the Wire details, the site is divide into four sections:
REC:on (a shortened from of the military term reconnaissance) is a space for a new “super-short hybrid sound format/series”;{w} ORGanize {grow} will act as a space to connect with other sound activists and ”real actors of change”; Feminist Sonic Technologies will include audio exhibitions, and Audio Collectif-ness will work as a podcast series about the artists involved.
Even when working as a solo artist, AGF’s work is deeply collaborative. In another nod to radical mycology, her mycelium score takes inspiration from the decentralized fungal networks, transforming them into a social score, for instance coaxing a hushed Berghain crowd into group humming exercise.
But all these years of collective projects don’t represent any love lost for the album format. On the contrary, in our conversation, AGF affirms the album remains her favorite artform, particularly for its ability to affect listeners. Part of the allure of the album is the ability that a work has to accumulate new meaning in the process of circulating independently of its creator, often finding new and unexpected audiences. Contemporary dancers, for instance, have found AGF’s work well-suited to accompanying their movements, resulting in some surprising collaborations, as when a young dancer in South Korea won a contest dancing to an AGF track.
This in turn has influenced AGF’s approach to music, with a few tracks on her latest album, Poemproducer, designed with dancers in mind. In fact, she tells me that from early in the development of the album she had decided to make this her “bass poetess” album, fittingly as the bass has long been understood as the central interface in the connection between music and the body. Bass is what makes us move, quite literally. But politics affects (and sometimes constricts) our movement as well, and political themes are never far from AGF’s work.
Coming 20 years after the release of her 2003 breakthrough album, Westernization Completed, Poemproducer is a triumphant return to solo albums from an artist who has been mostly occupied with collective projects in recent years. In fact, the track “fieldWORK” is built around field recordings from a #sonicwilderness workshop in the forests in Indonesia. The field recording heavy composition is outlier on the album as the only track featuring collaborators, but it also serves as the center of the Venn diagram of AGF’s work in recent years, further solidifying the connection between her poetic-political interconnectedness of voice, body, and environment.
#sonicwilderness – making music is labor
In this episode, we also discuss the influence hip hop has had on AGF as a poet and performer, giving her the confidence to tell her story and experiment with language. AGF admired rappers pride in their roots, and as a producer she has long worked with the MPC sampler (even if, like Madlib, she tends to use the ipad app these days). And while her approach to beat making is much less conventional and freeform, resisting the grid, she’s part of a much wider community of music producers whose hip hop influence often goes underappreciated. AGF, Pole, and Gold Chains & Sue Cie all appeared on the 2004 compilation Futurism Ain’t Shit To Me alongside beatmakers and rappers including Dabrye, Prefuse 73, Antipop Consortium, Dälek, and Aesop Rock, in a rare acknowledgement of their interconnectedness long before the global recognition of the LA Beat scene.
She and Delay have both talked about their love of hip hop, and each have even produced records for rappers (AGF with Berlin MC Quio, Delay most recently with AntiCon’s Beans). AGF also had various rappers and vocalists interpret German poetry over her beats for 2011’s Gedichterbe, further emphasizing the interconnectedness of her interests. But it’s not all experimental soundscapes and drum n bass inspired beats. As RyJ, AGF and Delay released Pickle Juice, an impressive 2012 Nicki Minaj mix weaving together her best bars without any hooks or choruses, enough to convince even the most ardent pop culture snob that Minaj deserves to be taken seriously as a rapper.
The poemproducer technique itself revolves around live and often improvised vocal experiments and free played beats, which are later edited and composed as poems, a technique made possible by the affordances of samplers and computer editing. But the live-played musical layers, natural rhythms rather than grid-determined precision, grants AGF’s work a unique feeling, one that also matches the estrangement of her use of language, whether transforming the German dictionary or simply deploying English as a non-native speaker. Both music and words produce a sense of alienation and foreignness that add to their appeal, turning a potential deficit into a celebration of difference. And that is the power of poetry, after all, producing new meaning where previously there was none. In our conversation, I point out the industrial connotation of the German produktion as it might apply to her preferred sobriquet, a connection she’s pleased with. But I also think of poetry’s Greek origin in poiesis, a term which refers not to linguistic poems but the act of creation or production itself, a connotation that grants extra significance to poemproducer.
mycelium score (2020)
Creation can often also involve deconstruction, as AGF’s experimentation with language and sound demonstrates. With Poemproducer, AGF is not only celebrating twenty years of westernization, but also marking a return of sorts, the completion of another cycle of interplay between voice and language, bass and rhythm, particular and universal, local and global. In retrospect it’s not hard to read leaving Berlin for Hailuoto not as a retreat but as a mission statement. The era of streaming and social media wants to reduce music to interchangeable content, rewarding constant output and crass commercialization. Content to be discontent, AGF breaks rank and marches to the beat of her own drum.
LINKS
AGF
Bandcamp
Soundcloud
@poemproducer
female:pressure
Rec-on.org
#sonicwilderness
Rojava
The Dissonance of Democracy
#sonicwilderness #NUSASONIC Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2018
TRACKLIST
ARTIST – “TITLE” (ALBUM, LABEL, YEAR)
AGF – “Oops for understanding iii” (Words Are Missing, AGF Producktion, 2008)
SP Intro
AGF – “SKINgame” (Poemproducer, AGF Producktion, 2023)
AGF – “POEMproducer” (Westernization Completed, Orthlorng Musork, 2003)
AG.F3 & SUE.C – “Lazy” (MINI MOVIES, Asphodel, 2006)
AGF – “Thoughts On Rojava feat. Zeynep Kurban, Dilar Dirik, Zaher Baher, Havin Guneser, Memed Aksoi” (Music, Awareness & Solidarity w/ Rojava Revolution, female:pressure, 2016)
AGF – “background & processes ⇻ explained by AGF” (rec-on : feminist sonic technologies, 2023)
AGF – “recon – rec-on.org ƒollow @reconsonic” (Soundcloud, 2021)
Laub – “Wortspur” (Filesharing, Kitty-Yo, 2002)
AGF – “fieldWORK” (Poemproducer, AGF Producktion, 2023)
Sonic Wilderness – “Medley” (DOCUMENTATION: #SONICWILDERNESS #NUSASONIC Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2018)
Antye Greie-Ripatti – “mycelium sonicification video clip” (Vimeo, 2017)
Audience Participation – “Collective Mycelium Hum” (SonicEX10sion, AGF Producktion, 2018)
AGF – “sideNESS” (Poemproducer, AGF Producktion, 2023)
AGF – “Live excerpt” (Presented by Non-Event and the Goethe-Institut Boston, November 18, 2023)
AGF – “FIREmushroom” (DISoriented MINDsets, 2017)
KING VISION ULTRA feat. Dreamcrusher – “UNTRAPPINGS” (SHOOK WORLD, PTP, 2023)
Moor Mother – “Deadbeat Protest” (Fetish Bones, Don Giovanni, 2016)
AGF – “MIGration” (SOLIDICITY, 2017)
AGF – “Chorizon” (Westernization Completed, Orthlorng Musork, 2003)
AGF – “Source Voice” (Beatnadel, AGF Producktion, 2011)
AGF – “words are useless” (Words Are Missing, AGF Producktion, 2008)
RyJ – “RyJ [excerpt]” (Studio Mix, 2014)
RyJ / Nicki Minaj (Pickle Juice Mix, 2012)
J Dilla – “Bounce” (Beat Tape #3, 2002)
AGF 
– bassPOETess (Poemproducer, AGF Producktion, 2023)
Vladislav Delay – “Ele” (Ele, Sigma Editions, 1999)
Craig Armstrong x AGF – “Remix of Memory Takes My Hand” (Memory Takes My Hand – Exhibition Music, Chester Music Ltd., 2006)
AGF – xenakISS (Poemproducer, AGF Producktion, 2023)
The Lappetites – “Avoiding Shopping” (Before The Libretto, Quecksilber, 2005)
Dadub – “Life (Rrose Remix)” (Preternity, Stroboscopic Artefacts, 2013)
AGF – “BONUS_ Westernization Continued 2013 [excerpt]” (Westernization Completed, 2003/2013)
AGF – “şamaran [kurdish]” (uttu EP, 2023)
PINKCOURTESYPHONE + KID CONGO POWERS – “Inflame (Sludge Dub)” (Move To Trash, 3particles, 2015)
Kevin Richard Martin / KMRU – “If (Dub)” (RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, PTP 2024)
Ka Baird – “Gate VI” (Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos, RVNG, Intl., 2024)
AGF – “Regional Distinctions” (Futurism Ain’t Shit To Me, Kyo, 2004)
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Sound Propositions is written, recorded, mixed, and produced by Joseph Sannicandro.
a closer listen 