The charitable and religious organisational context of the Station 17 project

Visiting Station 17 at their home base in Hamburg means visiting a project called Barner 16 located in an industrial building in the slightly alternative area of Hamburg-Altona. Barner 16 was founded in 2003. It is one of nine branches of the non-profit organisation Alsterarbeit Gmbh (‘Ltd’), which itself is one of ten subsidiaries of a Protestant foundation called Evangelische Stiftung Alsterdorf. Barner 16 provides jobs for fifty-six people – thirty-one of them disabled. (Alsterarbeit itself employs ca 1,000 people, while the foundation as a whole employs just under 4,000 people: www.alsterarbeit.de; www.alsterdorf.de) Twenty-one of the disabled are on the payroll as artists by a contract for a sheltered workshop, five persons have not yet reached that status and are employed as trainees in a special area of education called the Berufsbildungsbereich. The remaining five take part in the programme of daily encouragement for severely disabled people. Barner 16 is the branch of Alsterarbeit that works exclusively in the arts and culture field. According to Boysen, the head of Barner 16 and founder of Station 17, in Germany in the 1990s the major challenge for the disabled was to learn how to live outside of an institutionalised environment. Since then things have changed, because many disabled people are now used to spending their lives outside of an institutionalised context but within a machinery of integration. Hence, they have had to learn and be taught to experience and manage life where, in Boysen's phrase, ‘not everything is served hand and foot but where sometimes there is pressure that has to be withstood’ (personal interview 2007). Also, according to Boysen, the idea, the possibility, of being an artist or musician has to be planted in their heads.

In contrast, the non-disabled employees are not engaged as artists but as amateur caretakers or members of the administration within the context of the sheltered workspace Barner 16. As a consequence, all who are not part of the management have to train as educators or something equivalent to earn better pay, which Boysen has acknowledged as problematic:

Barner 16 and Station 17 need the ‘institutions’ because they are not able to make enough profit from their products to survive on their own. This is their second paradox – they regard themselves as professional artists in a capitalist surrounding. They want to be heard and bought because the consumer likes the music and not because it has been made in part by disabled musicians. Hence, they distance themselves explicitly from comparable projects by stressing that their activities are less pedagogically or advocacy oriented, but rather aesthetically driven. Yet the music industry standard commercial imperatives do not add up: Station 17 might expect to sell around 1,000 copies of an album they release, a level of success which for almost any other band would lead to a semi-professional career at very best. Therefore, their only way to survive economically is to take part in a charity structure, which allows them to be professional only because they are in part disabled. They have created for themselves an unloved niche in which to exist.

It is important to acknowledge that the original music project of Station 17 has effectively and successfully mushroomed into a much wider multi-media and cross-cultural set of activities, Barner 16, which has become the home of five bands, a dance company, a film and video production company, and a record label with booking agency and management. Also there is an atelier for fine arts and sculpture, rehearsal rooms, offices, rooms designated to become a recording studio, and rooms used for the daily encouragement of severely disabled people. Everyone at Barner 16 has at least two jobs. For example, two people from Station 17 work for the record company, while others are part of the dance group or take part in the organisation. Membership of the band Station 17 is also quite fluid. According to the current musical director, Christian Fleck, Station 17 consists of nine members plus himself at the time of the interview, while their MySpace site (www.myspace.com/17rec) lists thirteen people, including Fleck.

Internal structure and music

The internal structure of Station 17 evolves out of the history of the project with founder Boysen at the helm. Jobs like that of a musical director crystallise out of the history of his various activities: a mixture of artistic, educational, supportive and management functions that brings together a highly variable group of people.

At the beginning, in 1988, there was no band but just Boysen's idea to record an album with members of Alsterdorf's group home number 17, where he worked as an educator. The concept was to partner a well-known producer with one disabled performer, place them in a recording studio and listen to the outcome. The featured producers include F.M.Einheit of industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, Holger Czukay and Michael Rother of Krautrock legends Can and Neu!, Thomas Fehlmann later of The Orb, and Michael Grosskopf and Kai Hansen of the Heavy Metal Bands, Helloween and Gamma Ray. Boysen produced four tracks along with Stefan Walter who ran a recording studio. One of the reasons for the concept was that there was absolutely no infrastructure in terms of rehearsal rooms, or even instruments available in the group home or in the foundation as a whole. The disabled performers were chosen by Boysen to take part in the project as individuals. The reasons for the groupings with the producers varied from the disabled musicians being fans of at least the musical style the producer represents to the producer being regarded as able to cope artistically with the specific situation of the disabled artist. For example, according to the liner notes of the album, F.M.Einheit edited recordings of singer Wolfgang Ehlers accompanying himself with rhythmic noises he produced rolling around on his bed – an activity Ehlers repeated everyday at the same time. Boysen recorded this artistic activity and played the outcome to the artist who showed signs of approval and commented on the product. The comments were also recorded, edited, and assembled by F.M. Einheit. He was chosen as a producer because of the nature of his work with Einstürzende Neubauten, which included the artistic treatment of recorded voices of autistic children.

Only one producer, Holger Czukay of Can, questioned the given structure of one producer working with and on the artistic expressions of one disabled performer. Instead, he decided to form a band, which should improvise together. The resulting band consisted of members of Boysen's already existing own band, the post-punk outfit The Painless Dirties, and four of the disabled artists chosen by him.

Thenceforward there is a difference in membership of Station 17 as a recording project and of Station 17 as a live band, with the latter being a subset of the former. Up to and including 2007, eighty-two different musicians appear on recordings of Station 17. The second album Genau So (1993) featured thirty-two different musicians, the third Scheibe (1997) twenty-eight, and Bravo (1999) twenty-three, while the live band consisted mostly of twelve to fifteen members. Moreover, financing Station 17 with programmes of adult education supported the increase of people involved up to fifty. Confronted with the increase of interested participants, new non-disabled musicians with pedagogic training or at least pedagogic experience had to join the project. In fact, there were two bands, which were internally referred to as the jazz and the rock divisions. These groupings addressed the background and the preferences of the non-disabled members with the new musicians comprising the jazz division. To underscore the project character of the recordings, Scheibe, for instance, features nineteen tracks and nineteen different instrumentations and casts.

To form a noticeable unity out of this diversity is the responsibility of the musical director. He is the centre of a project consisting of disabled and non-disabled musicians and disabled lyricists. Being neither elected by the members of the group nor imposed on them by the management of the foundation or the specific branch, the musical director is rather somebody who is already known to the involved individuals and is trusted to cope with the difficulties of the situation.

To outline the history of musical direction, Boysen was the first to manage the role increasingly accompanied by drummer Harre Kühnast. Artistically, they relied on the Krautrock-driven idea of collective improvisation recommended by Czukay, but which became progressively influenced by electronic dance music. When Boysen resigned in 2002, Kühnast took over and brought in two new entrants – the studio owner, composer and bass player Nils Kacirek, and his associate Christian Mevs – to accompany him. Kacirek had released several albums with the drum and bass outfit Plexiq and works as a film music and radio play producer. Mevs played guitar with the anarcho punk band Slime in the 1980s and had started his first recording studio at the beginning of the 1990s. Together these three freelancers led Station 17 for four years and completed the move towards computer-based electronic music by minimising the portion of instrumental improvisation or on-stage sessions. Meanwhile in 2006 Christian Fleck acted as the musical director for a multimedia performance, which featured, among others, Station 17. In the same year he also became involved with the production of Station 17's sixth CD Mikroprofessor. When Kühnast, Kacirek and Mevs quit the job due to different artistic and economic problems, Fleck was employed by the foundation to take over. He opted for an artistic restart – back to Krautrock-inspired sessions but within a flexible electronic framework drawing on club culture. In order to understand the importance of that restart, however, one has to understand the different interests of the disabled and the non-disabled members within the given structure of the project.

‘This is no freak show’: therapeutic versus artistic expression in lyrics

The members of Station 17 share one cultural position: they do not want to be part of any scene which is constituted primarily around disability. To them this appears as a synonym of being dismissed or reduced as artists, musicians or just human beings. During the former period of instutionalised life, the disabled members wanted to share as much time and activities with non-disabled persons while the non-disabled wanted their artistic projects to be regarded as artistic and not therapeutic. Therefore, after the release of the debut Station 17 in 1990, founder Boysen was particularily angry about a sticker on the cover stating that with the purchase a donation is made to support the Alsterdorf foundation. Boysen wanted the album to be seen as an artistic experiment but, according to him, Phonogramm insisted on the charity character because they feared being accused of the exploitation of disabled people. As a reaction, the liner notes for the second album Genau So, which was released on the Hamburg-based independent label What's So Funny About, read

Cited here is the English translation of the liner notes provided with the album. The German original reads Unterhaltung, which can be translated as entertainment and/or conversation. In the context of the liner notes, the translation of Unterhaltung as conversation is intentionally wrong to emphasise that some of the disabled artists have to speak through the music because they are not able to use spoken language. Yet the disability of some of the members had to be perceptible in the music in some way, since, to put it bluntly, the disabilities of some members are Station 17's unique selling proposition within the pop market. The decision that all lyrics are written and sung by the disabled members has this effect directly.

What became questioned was the preferred kind of lyrics. Related to their content there are at least four different types: lyrics relating to life within the institution, those relating to experiences outside the institution, onomatopoetic or Dada-style sound texts, and lyrics with an absurd twist according to a non-disabled audience. The amount of lyrics of the first three types decreases over the years while the fourth type is becoming increasingly prominent. While the decrease in the onomatopoetic lyrics seems to be connected with artistic decisions, the drop in the first two types is related to the changing realities of life of the disabled lyricists, although singer and lyricist Karl-Heinz Hille emphasises the personal importance of lyrics of the second type by commenting on the Scheibe track, ‘Überall lauert Gefahr’ (‘Danger lurks everywhere’): ‘To be honest “Danger lurks everywhere” is my favourite track. In the lyrics I talk about fear’ (quoted in Station 17, 2003, trans. by Elflein).

The conceptual starting point of Station 17 was either the described grouping of one producer and one performer or collective improvisation as proposed by Czukay. Neither approach aims to train disabled persons how to make ‘real’ music but to experiment and to take them as they are. Within that context, onomatopoetic texts are a popular means of expression. At the same time the onomatopoetic texts underscore the difference of Station 17's cognitively impaired vocalists, and potentially undercut their aim to be perceived first and foremost as a music band and not a pedagogic or therapeutic project. On Genau So they resolved this problem by a rhythmic structuring of the onomatopoetic texts to make the unusual delivery less obvious. Such a rhythmic structure can be created by editing, while singing a correct melody during these years before software innovations made pitch-changing vocal lines a standard studio facility required the kind of vocal training which in turn suggests the conceptually opposed ‘real’ music making.

In the long run, Station 17 opted to reduce such avant gardist lyrics. While the second album Genau So featured at least seven tracks with onomatopoetic lyrics and in part onomatopoetic titles like ‘Hoageala’, ‘Ahuhooh’ or ‘Kagagoi’, on the fourth album Bravo there is only one onomatopoetic text left and on the sixth album Mikroprofessor there are no such lyrics at all. In a sense, they adapted to being ‘a little bit different’ by strengthening the humorous aspect of their lyrics.

Bravo is the first release with explicitly funny song titles like ‘Down in Colarado’ (original spelling), ‘Fischer and Friend’ playing with the association to the confectionery brand ‘Fisherman's Friend’, or ‘Lila Pause’ (‘Violet break’) which refers to the name of a chocolate bar and contains lyrics by Birgit Hohnen on the nature of time. Hohnen is a special member of Station 17. She does not appear in public because she cannot cope with being on stage. But her lyrics and her voice are featured on every Station 17 record except the debut, and the position of the tracks featuring her texts is always prominent. Her lyrics present an untranslatable ongoing stream of consciousness centred around a specific theme of her choosing or that is given to her by the musical director. The Scheibe track ‘1 Fach Denken’ (‘Just think’) explores the cognitive activity of thinking, while ‘Börsengang’ (‘Initial public offer’) (Goldstein Variation #1) is engaged with the stock exchange and features her literal interpretation that the German word Börsengang is a compound of the words stock exchange and to walk. Also Mikroprofessor is a word she invented out of combining the words and meanings of microprocessor and professor, saying that ‘im Computer sitzt der Mikroprofessor’ (‘inside the computer there sits the mikroprofessor’). To promote that lyrical approach the biography Station 17 present on their website speaks of ‘genial sinnverstellten Textfragmenten’ (‘the genial distorted sense of the text fragments’) (Anon Reference Anon2007).

Latent lyrical ambiguity is something Station 17 consciously play with. All the musical directors of Station 17 knew both the quasi-Dadaist character of texts like ‘Fahrstuhl’ (‘Elevator’) by Karl Heinz Hille (released on Mikroprofessor) where the chorus consists mostly of phrases like ‘drive up, drive down, e-e-e-elevator’, and the fact that the funny character is at least partially unintended by the lyricist. The video to ‘Bademeister’ (‘Bath attendant’) also released on Mikroprofessor illustrates that even more clearly. As if the text itself with singer and lyricist Horst Becker repeating, ‘everybody has to leave the water, this is the bath attendant speaking’ is not yet Dadaist enough, the video shows him with a megaphone calling his text within an empty stadium, at a train station, and so on.

Establishing a mode of music production

Thinking of the possibility of an audible difference in the music or the sounds made by disabled musicians in comparison to non-disabled musicians implies antiquated concepts like harmony equals music while disharmony equals noise with the disabled musicians taking the noisy part. Nevertheless, Station 17's inherent tension of wanting to be unique while trying not to be too different appears in each album, while as a general development the noisy parts of the music are minimalised. Technical innovations in hard disk recording, sequencing and editing boost this process by easing the possibility of creating sophisticated tracks. From the start, Station 17 have always been open minded about the latest innovations in studio technology. In a way the use of state-of-the-art technology in music production was regarded as equivalent to the use of the latest assistive technology. Rough edges are not something to be proud of but something that has to be polished, because of the danger of hurting someone. Station 17 wrongly thought of themselves as moving straight towards normalisation through the use of technology.

On the debut album, the applied method of production ranges from adding the voice of a disabled performer to a completely pre-produced backing track to the editing and (re-) arranging of soloistic recordings of individual disabled musicians, which could be instrumental, vocal or environmental in character. Editing was done by the use of the then new MIDI technology. By the means of the reduction of redundant notes, in the producer's view they edited what Boysen calls ‘the essence’ out of recorded solo improvisations of disabled musicians. This ‘essence’ could refer to fragments of a melody, a harmonic progression or a rhythmic pattern. Czukay's proposal to edit pieces out of long parts of collective improvisation made by a group of disabled and non-disabled musicians became the second method of production. These two already describe the framework of artistic expression the work of Station 17 has oscillated between over the years.

Following the release of the debut, a permanent rehearsal room was established and some instruments were purchased for the emerging new band. The normal working process was one of collective improvisation in either jazz or rock division-dominated ensembles as proposed by Czukay, in which lyrics and vocals were provided by the disabled band members. Recording Genau So in 1992 involved rebuilding a recording studio in the band's rehearsal room, recording the sessions on DAT-Tape or two synchronised eight-track tape machines, subsequently followed by heavy analogue editing of the tapes in a pre-digital cut and paste manner. The then edited tracks provided a basis for new sessions and recordings, while the vocals normally were recorded as overdubs.

On musical taste – questions of reference

Collective improvisation is predicated on communication. But Station 17 had to learn that to communicate is not synonymous with understanding each other, especially each other's musical taste. Besides the musical direction, to understand each other as well as possible is important to address the potential issue of exploiting especially the disabled members of the band by ignoring their wishes and interests. In this context, Boysen tells a significant story.

Max Greger is a well-known commercial, swing-influenced German big band leader who frequently appeared on television, and whose music has nothing to do with that of Ornette Coleman except that both play the saxophone. According to Boysen, this was the moment when the band as a whole first became aware of the importance of acknowledging and addressing the differing musical influences of the non-disabled and the disabled members of Station 17, a discussion that would in turn determine the production of the third album Scheibe. To generalise: the non-disabled members all had a (post-) punk or jazz background with curiosity for new musical developments and animosities towards rockism, while the majority of the disabled members liked German pop, folksy pop and easy listening, which were the dominant music forms offered in institutions. Such differing popular music traditions, discourses and tastes forced the band to interrogate the extent to which there was, or could be, common ground for the project. The Scheibe track ‘Vernichtungsmaid’ (‘Annihilation maiden’) represents a more productive twist of another similar misunderstanding. As was reported in a journalistic feature following the release of Scheibe:

The track features Karl Heinz Hille on vocals repeating the choruses of both tracks in succession. The music is based upon Friedrich's noise guitar rhythm, a succession of four quavers and two crotchets. The first of the crotchets is doubled each time by a percussive sound, which is redolent of the analogical sound on the Einstürzende Neubauten track. In addition, one hears a solo improvisation on organ and a harsh and noisy synthesizer sequence. By letting a guest producer, F.M.Einheit, decide that a third person, Hille, should verbalise both connotations in the song ‘Vernichtungsmaid’, Station 17 uses these connotations to create a new piece of music which combines the associations of a disabled and a non-disabled musician.

According to Boysen, in the 1980s and 1990s, musical socialisation within the institution resulted from the regular consumption of folksy pop or German pop tapes. He thinks that the reason for this quasi-institutionalised taste in music is the desire for a combination of a regular danceable metre with German lyrics. Keeping in mind that (i) folksy pop is one of the best-selling musical genres in Germany, (ii) this genre is featured very prominently in German television (see Elflein 2005), and (iii) television is the preferred and simplest way to gain access to an idea of social normality if you are banned from direct participation, the preference for this kind of music is explicable. While it is difficult to talk about an institutionalised taste in music, it is important to recognise that the institutions have of course been areas with restricted access to emerging popular music or youth cultures.

Scheibe featured several citations of German folk and pop songs, which addressed this question of musical tastes. Apart from the already mentioned ‘Schöne Maid’, there are references to, amongst others, ‘Es gibt kein Bier auf Hawaii’ (‘There is no beer available in Hawaii’), a 1964 pop hit by Swing band leader Paul Kuhn; ‘Herzilein’ (‘Sweetheart’), a 1990 folksy pop hit by the Wildecker Herzbuben; the folk or children's song ‘Ein Hund kam in die Küche’ (‘A dog came into the kitchen’); and ‘Verpiß dich’ (‘Piss off’), a 1996 hit single by a female trio called Tic Tac Toe, that featured rap vocals.

In some ways the appearance of guest producers connected with the German hip hop scene on the next record Bravo makes clear sense, since it can be seen to be an attempt by the musical directors to understand and (re)negotiate the musical taste of the disabled musicians. After all, if their preferred music features a danceable beat and German lyrics, then local hip hop may be worth a try.

Concomitantly, one could question the whole problem of musical reference and strengthen the argument that it is more important that both parties agree on the quality of a certain piece of music they have created together and had fun in making, than to care about potentially different connotations and influences. Thus the musical directors discovered the similarities of the rhythms of polka and techno, both relying on a regular bass drum in each measure. This justified Station 17's move towards electronic music, which dominated the next three albums, as grounded in the urge to be responsive to the needs of the disabled members.

The evolution of the mode of production

Prior to the production in 1997 of Scheibe, the mode of artistic production had featured loop-based sessions. This was done because the mode of collective improvisation led to the burnout of the non-disabled members. In particular, the live concerts of Station 17 during the Genau So period featured no overdubs and even the lyrics were improvised. This demand resulted in an increasing lack of ideas, even if a concert consisted normally of two sets of forty-five to sixty minutes, one by the jazz and one by the rock division. As a last-ditch attempt, drummer Kühnast, who had already started to work as a techno DJ, proposed adding his turntables to the rehearsals. This modified way of working turned out to be the new idea that brought back the energy necessary to continue. Sampling and sequencing were added to the already used MIDI technology and became increasingly important. The used loops were of different origins, mostly taken from electronic dance music records.

With the next record, Bravo, Station 17 went one step further. Their loop- and sample-based session recordings were given to an independent producer with the request to form tracks out of the recordings. For the first time, no member of the group was present during the production process. Thomas Fehlmann of the British ambient artists The Orb, who had played previously with Station 17, was chosen as producer, which ensured that Station 17's ongoing move towards electronic music continued.

Doing a remix album, an idea proposed to the band by the upcoming musical director, Kühnast, then seemed the next logical step. Contemporary interviews with Boysen and Kühnast go as far as describing remixing as a sophisticated way of improvisation, saying that ‘to improvise was the best we could do at that time’ and reinterpreting the debut as also being kind of a remix-record, because ‘we gave our tracks to other people to produce them’ (quoted in Frank Reference Frank2001; trans. by Elflein).

While there may be a certain marketing imperative in all such statements around a new album, it nevertheless underlines the musical directors' conviction in their artistic direction. The resulting remix album Hitparade featured well-known artists from the German electronic music and hip-hop scenes including Fehlmann and F.M. Einheit. The only Station 17 member providing a remix was unsurprisingly Kühnast, as one half of the duo automatique. While the Hamburg-based independent label What's So Funny About released Genau So, Scheibe and Bravo, Hitparade was released by the well-known international label Mute Records and became the most successful release of Station 17 to date.

Live in concert

The partial outsourcing of the production process provided the non-disabled members of the project with more time and energy for the live performances. This happened because, for most of the disabled musicians, the adventure of being on the road became the focus of the activities of Station 17, while recording a new album was less important. Boysen recalls:

He identifies a change in the experience of the disabled Station 17 musicians. In the beginning there was the closed circuit of group home and sheltered workspace with almost no room for participation in cultural events. Then in the 1990s the band provided a possibility to escape that dull version of reality. The new millennium has allowed many disabled musicians who have never been in a group home or worked in a sheltered workspace, but who come from integrated schools, to aim for an artistic career by applying for a job at Barner 16, and the formative aspects of 1990s Station 17 are completely irrelevant to them today (Boysen, personal interview, 2007). They aim for other experiences.

But back in the era of Genau So, the disabled musicians built up a pressure to tour as often as possible. For example, the film documentary of the 1995 tour, itself titled Station 17, features percussionist Willy Müller talking about his fear of not playing live anymore:

As a result, in 1997, parallel to the release of Scheibe, Station 17 entered a contract with a professional tour management and booking agency, which resulted in increased playing opportunities, in bigger and more prestigious venues, and better payment. The continuous tour of Station 17 then started and lasted for over five years. The collective improvisations by the jazz and rock divisions, which had until then characterised Station 17 in concert, slowly changed again due to technical innovations. By reproducing the loop-based mode of production in concert, the extensive onstage use of samplers and audio sequencers resulted in the performances becoming less flexible. On the one side, samples and sequences provided a stream of new ideas that kept the improvisations fresh and exciting for the participants; on the other, Station 17 started to improvise on stage over backing tracks of their own songs instead of collective free improvisation. For the first time an audience of Station 17 heard something they possibly already knew from a record. Starting with the loops providing basic ideas to improvise on, the loops slowly developed into the direction of pre-produced backing tracks which in the end didn't loop anymore but had defined beginnings and endings. Such a playback cannot respond any more to improvisations. Changes in tempo or harmony, for example, became impossible.

The tour changed in 2002 due largely to the restructuring process that would lead to the foundation of Barner 16 in 2003. In the wake of this development, founder Boysen decided to concentrate on organisation and resigned from his role as an active musician, with significant changes following across the key jazz musicians working with the band. This was the beginning of Station 17's second major line-up change, which would itself last five years, before a further artistic refiguration of the whole project in 2007. The first had occurred between Genau So and Scheibe, when eleven musicians left mainly due to problems related to touring. Boysen opted for a gentle change both for him and the band by continuing to accompany the band on tour from 2006 while Kühnast continued as bandleader together with his colleagues Kacirek and Mevs.

The end of an evolution

Station 17's sixth album Mikroprofessor, released on Barner 16's own record label in 2006, was intended as a symbol of the end of the restructuring phase the project had gone through. But its mode of production came back full circle to the early praxis of non-disabled producers working with selected disabled performers mostly on the vocals, and it stirred up a new aesthetic and artistic debate. Mikroprofessor turned out to be a state of the art electronic music album. Interestingly it received the greatest airplay Station 17 had ever had, especially the previously mentioned track ‘Fahrstuhl’, and some tracks were even licensed to compilations in England, France and Russia. But little session work took place in the rehearsal room to create the record and in general only a rather modest portion of band work was involved. Unlike Boysen, the new musical directors were not employed at Alsterarbeit, but continued to work freelance. Their decision to produce the record by themselves instead of continuing the process to spend as much time as possible with and around the concerts may have been due to economic reasons or perhaps was connected with their urge to prove their artistic qualifications as Station 17's new musical directors. Because of the budget that existed due to Hitparade's relative success, the producers could spend as much time on a song as necessary, but during that time no other band activities happened. The scene of the unprepared Karl-Heinz Hille, a member of Station 17 since Scheibe, trying to record his vocals for the track ‘Fahrstuhl’, which is part of a TV documentary on Station 17, can be seen as a metaphor for this ongoing process of Station 17 becoming unimportant for long-time contributors (Station 17, 2003). The reluctant interests of the disabled and non-disabled members of the project brought Station 17 to a dead end. The focus of the disabled musicians on playing live resulted in their relative exclusion from the recording process, except for being needed to provide the vocals that turned the record into a recognisable Station 17 release. This also had an impact on the concerts, as Christian Fleck remembers:

As previously discussed, Station 17's move towards electronic music originated at least partially in the urge to be responsive to the needs of the disabled members, but in the end it reduced the role of the disabled members of the band to vocalists. I argue that this effective diminution of the contributions of the disabled musicians is inscribed in the actual structure of Station 17 from the very beginning of the project in two ways. First, Station 17 is a group with disabled and non-disabled members where exclusively the disabled members sing the vocals while the music can be performed by both groups of members, and, second, the production process of a record is the primary concern of the musical director while the disabled members concentrate on live concerts.

Restart (#3): re-presenting Station 17 history

The third musical director of Station 17, Christian Fleck, is on the payroll of Barner 16 precisely to avoid repeating errors. He has revitalised the rehearsal room and started to bring together a band again. If 2006's Mikroprofessor seemed to be a recurrence of the first, eponymous album Station 17 from 1990, then Fleck's idea of Station 17 has been to go one step further in their own history and revitalise the Kraut influence of the Genau So and Scheibe era with a shift of emphasis from Can-inspired experimentations to the never-ending beat of Neu!. This means Station 17 are not only going back in history but are still working with the benefits of electronic music and club culture. Perhaps this is symbolised best by the coexistence of guitars and computers on stage in 2008. While the guitar disappeared during the period of Bravo, Hitparade and Mikroprofessor, seeing Station 17 play in February 2008 meant seeing laptop, keyboards, drums, bass, and up to three guitars onstage.

But bringing back analogue instruments like the guitar seems not to be enough to break up firmly established structures when the computer-based sequencers stay inflexible and minimise further the possibilities of improvisation. Therefore Fleck opted for a change in software, substituting Steinberg's Cubase for Ableton's Live. Two main differences are important in this change of choice of sequencer here. With Live, new samples, which are added to the arrangement, do not start until the beginning of the next bar, and all used samples are time stretched in real time to correspond with the existing tempo of the song. These two features make Live a much more flexible performance tool than other software sequencers, which are still mainly designed to become the centre of a recording studio. Therefore Fleck, who is operating Live onstage, is able to participate in a two-way communication with his band to create once again the Krautrock-influenced sessions that characterise their live concerts.

Station 17 plan to release six twelve-inch vinyl records as a series of collaborations with well-known German artists, including Tocotronic, former Neu! member Michael Rother, Barabara Morgenstern and The Robokop Krauss. Only the first twelve-inch single was available during the process of writing this article, while recordings were already finished on some of the following releases. Unlike the mode of production on the debut album, all the collaborators now come to the rehearsal room at Barner 16 to work on the project. Fleck and the featured guests thus heed Czukay's almost twenty-year-old advice to create situations and moods. The reduction of the disabled members to being vocalists ended, but all vocalists are still disabled.

Another consciously laid trace back to the era of Genau So's early days is the artwork of the twelve-inch releases, which features a group of disabled artists called the Atelier Goldstein. Genau So had featured a group from inside the Alsterdorf foundation called the ‘Schlumper Maler’ as cover artists while all other releases relied on standard artwork including the Tarantino-styled photos by Anton Corbijn on Hitparade.

Hence, when Station 17 suffered from unsatisfying live performances during the Mikroprofessor era there is evidence that the acting musical directors were no longer able to change direction because of their long history with the project. Their formal dissolving was necessary to revive the project. But the new team started to revive the band with the old musical directors still in charge so that, despite the dramatic situation, a smooth transition was possible.

The recourse to the idea of jam sessions and the renewal of the Krautrock influence would not have been possible with the old staff of non-disabled musicians. But some of the disabled musicians agreed with the move and continued as members of Station 17, thus mixing old and new within the disabled members.

Summary – squaring the circle

Station 17 and Barner 16 managed to become a community of professional artists, who are in part disabled. To cope with their specific situation they are forced to square the circle in several ways. In economic terms only the disabled members of Barner 16 are employed as artists, while the non-disabled are paid as amateur caretakers. Therefore, the non-disabled artists have to train as educators or something equivalent to receive better pay. Station 17 constantly refuse to be regarded as a pedagogic or therapeutic project, but the only way for them to survive economically is to take part in such a structure. The wish to successfully participate in the pop market leads to an increase of lyrics with a humorous twist, while the amount of lyrics addressing life within and without the instituion as well as onomatopoetic lyrics decreases. Also, the decision that lyrics are exclusively provided by the disabled members of the project can be seen as the starting point of that process.

From the very beginning, two major approaches to artistic production accompany the project. The history of Station 17 shows that both ways lead to a dead end. Krautrock-driven collective improvisation was their first choice, especially on stage, but led to the burnout of the non-disabled members. The move from Krautrock-inspired sessions to state-of-the-art electronic (dance) music was conceived as a reaction to the aesthetic wishes and needs of the disabled members, but the pre-produced backing tracks made the concerts inflexible and reduced the role of the disabled-members to providing vocals and lyrics.

But Station 17 are able to learn from experience. A third artistic restart attempts to combine the best of both worlds. Onstage and rehearsal room sessions are back and are combined with a more flexible electronic setup. Therefore Station 17 are alive and willing to square the circle again.