Lukas Kurz
Longtime indie rock drummer turned engineer, producer, and composer.
I’m not sure if Lukas Kurz has read Rick Rubin’s book or not, I‘m a little embarrassed to ask him. I started to read it a while ago but I got stuck on the first page. It just has this dead white guy quote from Robert Henri:
“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
I’m so tired of dead white guy quotes. Google that one if you want to see a thousand Pinterest pins with ocean and mountain watercolor backgrounds. Fine, I can get past it, just like I’ve gotten over the famous quote that Henry Ford never said.
Except that I can’t. Because like the fake Ford quote, the thing that Henri said about making art is just so damn true.
Of course, it’s on the first page of Rubin’s book for a reason: this truism is extra true for music producers. Painters like Henri have it easy, they work by themselves. As a music producer, you have to make this “inevitable art” thing happen on a schedule, for weeks at a time, with a large group of people. Good luck with that.
Lukas Kurz is a producer who gets this about making music. It’s a process, and you have to stay focused on sculpting the process more than creating some specific hoped-for outcome. Being a good music producer calls for an arcane mixture of skills: technical audio production, music theory, mental telepathy, and talk therapy. You use all these tools to try to create a set of circumstances wherein art will end up happening. That’s what I saw Lukas doing while we were recording What More.
Since leaving his role as the long-time drummer in Berlin-based indie rock band Leon Francis Farrow, Lukas has been developing a solo project, Der Frühling, while also composing musical scores for theatre, engineering live shows for other bands, and producing recordings for other recording artists. He produced all four songs on The Ellis Court’s first EP, as well as playing keyboards, arranging horn parts, and even co-writing the title track with me. I love the videos page on his website, also check out his work reel on Spotify.
