Last week, while I was in Vienna, I met up with Bobby Would. An artist who is originally from outside of Vienna and who has lived all over. RT has covered a lot projects he has been involved with in the past, so it was great to finally sit down and get some answers out of this elusive character. Check out his new album on Cost of Living here.
Hi Bobby Would. Can you tell us where you are based nowadays?
Good question, but to be honest I’m not really based anywhere at the moment. In the last two years I’ve spent a lot of time in New York, which makes me feel like I’m based there. But my belongings are mostly in Vienna and Berlin. I change locations regularly – partly for professional reasons, but also for my own exhibitions and performances. It might become NYC though.
Yeah you’re also active as an artist working across several media. On your most recent record Mumia I feel like your music is approaching or at least situating itself in relation to your visual practice. Can you tell us how that happened?
I avoided combining these two ways of working and thinking for a long time. I have a DIY background, which means mainly punk and noise music. I never wanted that to blend into what I do in the art studio. There was always reciprocity: the moment I couldn’t take the art anymore, I made loud music, and when I got tired of that, the silence of visual art was already waiting there.
The older I get, the greater the urge to merge these two parts of me becomes, and I automatically look for ways to find a tolerable combination. In this particular case, it came unto me in the way grief sometimes does. My close friend, the Italian artist Sven Sachsalber, died mysteriously in 2020 during a visit to Vienna. We spent a lot of time walking from my studio to the art supply store – crossing a cemetery and making fun of people’s names and graves.
At the time he was working on a series in which he painted Pantone cards. Shades of extinct pigments. He always had a morbid approach, but very humorous – a bit like Martin Kippenberger. During the second wave of the pandemic, I took a job in the far southwest of Germany, near the French border, and had to leave Vienna. The day I arrived in Saarbrücken, I received news that Sven had been found dead in his apartment in Vienna, but no further details.
After arriving in Saarbrücken I was given the key to an empty apartment opposite the opera house. Empty except for the wardrobe, which had a single green bomber jacket like Sven’s hanging in there. Sounds strange, and it was. I ran around all night looking for food, slept with the lights on and started recording Mumia. I picked up Sven’s research about pigments and since we were planning to record a dark ambient album, I combined the two ideas.
Because of the over-crowded hospitals, it took two weeks to find out what really happened to Sven. Friends and family eventually learned that he had developed a complicated heart condition, since he’d been a professional skier in his youth.
Incredible, thank you for sharing this story. You also mentioned a unique stage adaptation of the record?
Yes, it’s very new for me to think this way and therefore an experiment, but Mumia will be turned into an ambient performance-happening. I will adapt the cover artwork and have 4 parts performed in different settings: Live musicians, a dance choregraphy, a reading of Sven’s text ”Berg” and an abstract guitar performance. I won’t be performing myself – I’m directing and conducting, so to speak.
I first heard about Bobby Would in 2019. Were you living in Berlin at that time? How did that era end?
I lived in Berlin for maybe 5-6 years, I can’t say exactly when it started as I was visiting every so often. When I finally relocated, it became the start of a stressful flat hunt, in an already slightly changing Berlin. I moved 9 or 10 times within a short space of time, all the while traveling like a madman with different musical projects and for work, at Austrian artist Hans Weigand’s studio in the southeast of Austria.
In 2017 I found myself an affordable studio in Berlin-Weissensee that I shared with another artist, but I was the only one also living there. In less than a year we were told we had to move again and I just gave up. My inner circle was splitting up: Josh (Itchy Bugger, Heavy Metal, Diät etc.) went back to Sydney, Jasper (Heavy Metal) moved to Kassel… But also because I was offered to rent an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of Vienna for very cheap.
Back then you were releasing music on Low Company from London – how did you meet those people?
I think we had already released the third Heavy Metal LP at that point and people knew about it, don’t ask me why. Josh and I started recording two songs after a weekend of partying – three days with no sleep, typical Berlin bender – and named the band Stupid Island, directly uploading the tracks for no real reason and turned it into Itchy Bugger shortly after, which was the name of Josh’s Soundcloud account at that time.
We recorded the entire first LP in my studio in Weissensee and those were Josh’s songs with a little contribution from me – at least that’s how I see it. I have a lot of respect for his way of making and understanding music. Josh’s a magical person and I learned a lot from him. I loved Diät and really appreciated that he wanted to work with me on something other than Heavy Metal.
Long story short, Low Company launched their label with Itchy Bugger’s Done One and since I was communicating with them anyway, I sent Kiran and Sanjay a track I had recorded in the summer of 2017. They told me to send everything over as soon as I finished recording. I did, and that became the first Bobby Would LP the following year.
So before Bobby Would you played in Heavy Metal, but this wasn’t your first band. When and how did you actually start making music?
Heavy Metal was/is a recording project, we never played live actually. I played in a lot of bands. I was definitely a late bloomer. I was working as a dishwasher at the age of 13 and I really wanted to have a drum kit. I had never learnt how to play an instrument, never took lessons or anything like that. And although I earned enough money to buy a run-down second hand drum kit, there was always someone who played drums better than me. So I stuck to guitar, bass and vocals.
Back then we had a group of outsiders in my hometown – basically punks and skaters – and it was either music or skating. Since I couldn’t skate very well I started playing in a few bands. My first one was a pretty fast punk band, at 16 I sang in a thrash metal band, then I moved to Munich where I had another wannabe KBD punk band, and I started recording my first solo projects on tape. The list of groups is long, I’d like to spare you that.
A new project that you’re involved with is Healing. Can you tell us why you started yet another band?
In 2022 I began returning to NYC. One of the first things I did was to play a Bobby Would show at Kaos Komputer (RIP) in Brooklyn, hosted by Eugene Terry who did a Dead Garfield poster and also performed with his group Abism. To me, Eugene is a young New York legend and runs his illustration bureau Papertown Company (which is also responsible for the artwork on the second Itchy Bugger record).
When Soybot (Berni Fuchs aka Burn Björn), Stiege 13 and me published my book Infinite Riff, I sent him a copy. We then played a few shows together in Berlin – at least one where my band Sick Horse supported his band Cheena (with Margaret Chardiet aka Pharmakon on vocals). Well, one thing led to another and we recorded some naive songs at Bushwick Mansion where I often stay in Brooklyn. We didn’t really have a plan, we just wanted to hang out and record.
At one point Eugene texted me that he suddenly knew who should be singing on it: Jason from Blotter, based in Los Angeles. I spent a month there in 2023 and got to know Jason briefly. A short while later the first 6 tracks were finished and Eugene and Jason met in Las Vegas to record the vocals. I’m not sure why Eugene sent the EP to Joe, who runs RoachLeg Records, but I was really happy when he said he wanted to release the tape. We’ve already recorded a full album and I’m pretty sure we’ll finish it and release it… at some point.
You’ve played with so many different people in the past, some of them also from Vienna, like Rosa Nebel. Are there still people around in the city that you want to collaborate with?
I’m really out of the loop in Vienna, at least music scene-wise. I enjoyed playing with a few kids from the DIY scene for a while, started the band Autor (because I wanted to play drums) as well as Pitva and Agit while I was stranded here during Covid. I still perform with my friends Muscle Barbie once a year – each time could be the last. Also with Robert Schwarz as PRIVAT on Alter Records, which was a typical pandemic record. I made noise with my close friend and sound artist Albert Mayr since 2017 and called it SCANS.
I’m pretty sure there are other people out there I could work with, but Vienna is not the most vibrant place for my kind of music and my multi-media mindset, I guess. When I’m here, I like the peace and quiet more than looking for new collaborations.
Yeah, the LP by Privat was one of my favourite non-Bobby Would projects. Is this still ongoing?
It’s still a bit up in the air, but Robert and I are close friends and we’ve recorded a lot of different music over the years, so I’m sure we’ll release a follow-up LP at some point.
There’s almost no information about Bobby Would online. Has this chosen anonymity ever made it hard for you to reach an audience?
Bobby Would is very intimate. I never wanted to put a stamp on the project or sell it, and I’m happy and grateful that I’ve come into contact with so many great people anyway. I’ve been hiding behind pen names for a long time. I’ve built a labyrinth for myself and others who are interested in this kind of thing, to have fun with it.
Then again, there’s a lot of documentation offline, e.g. the book Infinite Riff that you mentioned. You described it as 10 years of chaos. What comes after chaos, is there a future for Bobby Would?
I am a collector, whether I want to or not. I think my life is a circle of making a mess and then cleaning it up. Again, something I haven’t really done consciously but I’ve collected almost every flyer, poster, sticker, photo etc. from all the shows I’ve played, which are quite many. In the summer of 2020 I got boxes of stuff out of my storage in Berlin and started scanning and photographing – cataloguing. It seemed natural to me because 2020 was the first year in my adult life where I hadn’t scheduled a show. I woke up from a constant booking marathon and was finally able to look back on the last few years.
I guess after the chaos comes more chaos, but maybe different ways of dealing with it. For me, this book was a reason to get in touch with all the people I’ve been on tour with, or met on tour. Everyone who doesn’t normally get the credit is mentioned in the book: photographers, people who made flyers, die-hard fans of a shitty band I played in, people who wrote reviews, people from the label, bookers, promoters, writers – you name it.
I am also curious about the future of Bobby Would. One thing is for sure – regardless of in what form – something will probably come along.
