She Put A Record On: An Interview With Gudrun Gut

Gudrun circa 1977
Photo © Anja Freyja

Popshifter: It’s clear you are not the “average girl,” with lackluster ambitions of being a passive housewife, or something boring like that. You have racked up quite an impressive resume over the past 30 years! You started carving your own niche when you were still a very young girl, so I have to ask: when you were still a little girl, did you ever feel different from the rest of the pack?

Gudrun Gut: No, not really. At school we had a little girl gang. Five girls being bold and doing bad stuff and having fun together.

Popshifter: Did you realize pretty early on that you had inclinations that were light years ahead of you?

Gudrun Gut: Ha! Strange question, but I sometimes thought I was born too early, and the strange thing is that I was half-dead and blue when I arrived (the umbilical cord was tangled around my neck). They had to hit me with hot and cold water to bring me back to life. Maybe my soul was wondering if it was too early? Ha!

Popshifter: Was music and creativity, in general, a big part of your upbringing? Were you encouraged by your family to pursue unconventional interests?

Gudrun Gut: My grandmother played the piano; my grandpa and my mother were painting in their spare time.

Popshifter: Did you start collecting music at a young age?

Gudrun Gut: No, I’m not a collector . . . but I loved music and already worked at an underground mail order place while at school. I hung around record stores and listened to records with friends; music was always a very important part of my life. In Berlin at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, I worked in a record shop called The Zensor. They had all these cool indie records with self-made sleeves, etc.

Popshifter: So you went to art school (Hochschule der Künste, Berlin) . . . what area of the arts were you concentrating on?

Gudrun Gut: I did prints, calligraphy and Super 8 films. I wanted to become an experimental film director, but then I realized that for movies . . . you need a story, and I hated stories. Doing movies takes lots of money and time . . . and music was much faster to do, and more abstract.

Popshifter: Do you still work in the area of arts you studied, or is it music full-time?

Gudrun Gut: Yes. I recently have been part of a group exhibit called “Transgression,” here in Berlin.

Popshifter: Had you had any training in any sort of audio production or musical instruments, or are you all self-taught? Are you just intuitively technical?

Gudrun Gut: I used to play the flute, and then the accordion . . . but that was in my school days. Yes, I taught myself to play the drums and all the other things. We were proud not to be able to play the instruments. This scene of musicians was called the “Geniale Dilletanten.” We used the mistakes, instead of erasing them. And, I grew up with my mother and my sister and without a man in the house. . . and my mother was a technical disaster! Me and my sister did all the repair stuff, like connecting the hi-fi and light bulbs and renovating. My tech-feel is intuitively well!

Click to read more from Gudrun Gut on. . .

Not the average girl
Mania D, Matador, Malaria!, Miasma
The Ocean Club
Monika Enterprise and Mac
Recent activities
Not so serious

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