This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom. Christian Broecking

the other would say it was improvisation. And GEMA always paid up. But with these things it was at the lowest level that they had. Because otherwise you would have had to submit scores, printed scores, so that you would get a better rate.”

      In the online history of FMP that he created, Gebers has, over time, provided all the reliable information he has about the history of FMP. In doing so, he has compared all the program announcements and information he could find with his own notes and records, so as to reconstruct the line-ups and locations of the concerts and recordings as reliably as possible. “There are certainly also things of Irène’s on tape somewhere in the archive. I just dug out the Feminist Improvising Group. I have to sit down and digitize it. I have a very vivid memory of it. We wanted to document the Total Music Meeting, similar to what we did with For Example at the workshop. And there was an aspect of the Feminist Improvising Group, for example when they played an Eisler parody, that I always had in mind. I thought if we did something like that it would have to be released. But like I said, I just recently dug it out and I have to sit down and listen to the three sets, to see what’s actually there. It’s always a bit difficult to remember these things exactly because at the time I was working. I couldn’t say, given the fragments I heard, if what happened on stage was really good or was junk. You don’t hear the music until afterwards. We recorded everything, and most of it hasn’t been released.”

      “I have a converted garage here in my house. There’s nothing but tapes in it. And no one has ever heard them! A lot of them, from before we switched over to multitrack recording, haven’t been mixed. It’s going slowly. At the moment I’m in the process of digitizing the LPs, so they’ll be available again, at least as downloads.”

      “People say that the 1970s were Irène’s Berlin and FMP years. The LP with John Tchicai, Willi the Pig, was recorded in Willisau and re-released by John Corbett. We didn’t work together with Willisau. We knew about each other—it wouldn’t have been competition unless he had done it in Berlin. But Willisau, no, that wasn’t the center.”

      Photo: Christian Broecking

      Jost Gebers, FMP archive, 2013