My Berlin based friends Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Rainer Frey host a monthly concert series called ‚Polyphony at the BAIZ‘ in a Prenzlauer Berg bar called BAIZ. The famous place feels like a remnant of the anarchist/communist alternative scene that was strong in the Berlin of the 1970s/1980s – sadly there aren’t many places like this left.
For each concert, Bernhard and Rainer invite a guest musician and create an evening of improvised music with him/her. They invited me for episode 009 on October 15, 2024.
I arrived with guitar and my new elaborated pedalboard full of secret weapons – several of which worked great at home but turned out not to work on stage. Oh well, disappointment!
But then there were enough sounds left in my arsenal and we had a fun evening anyway. There were more people in the audience than I had expected, and afterwards, the hat with the tips was full, so apparently our sonic assault was liked by many.
A slightly edited recording of the evening was made available here:
In late October 2023, my The Absurd band colleague Michael Frank and I travelled to California, for fun and especially to perform on the 20th anniversary of Rick Walker’s Y2KLoopfest, an international gathering of musicians who use livelooping as a central element of their music.
San Francisco! We spent three fab days here. They say that the city is not what it used to be but … this short time was enough to make us feel sad when we had to leave.
After this: a week in Santa Cruz, hanging out with the crazy livelooping tribe. Rick Walker was the organizing hero again. The private accommodation he found for us was amazing (big thanks to Philippe and Ruth for having us !!!).
Intense three festival days – very diverse half hour sets of almost 40 musicians from the US, Europe, and Japan. What an incredible collection of talent, and all just for the love of it – not for money! This is a nonprofit thing and nobody got paid.
Liveloopers Tim Thompson and David Tristram created the psychedelic video backdrops during the festival, and several of us worked hard to create a good sound and to keep the festival running.
On the evening of the first day, Rick Walker (drums + percussion) jammed with Michael Frank and me under the name of „Third Wave“. I wasn’t quite convinced of my own contributions, but it was fun anyway, and the audience seemed to like it. (The second video contains a shorter remix by Michael Frank focussing on the psychedelic animation backdrop.)
I started the evening of the final festival day with my solo set. (Sorry for the video quality – the main view was taken from the live stream which was great to have – thx to Bob Amstadt – but for some reason the images stuttered and didn’t run as smoothly as the sound, the other view is from a little camera in front of my feet.)
The music is mostly sonically demanding (with harmonious interludes) and experimental. Listen loud if you love experimental music! I used my old Hohner GT2 guitar with a midi pickup, just an iPad as guitar processor, running virtual instruments, sound processors, and loopers (such as Loopy Pro with four unsynced loops this time, and Hainbach’s Gauss).
Michael Frank performed after me. He played a combination of his compositions for The Absurd, rearranged as solo pieces, plus loop sound improvisations. I loved his set and many other people did as well.
It rained on the Monday after the festival, and it was sad to say farewell to everyone, old and new friends. The livelooping community feels so much like family, and who knows when we can meet again !
After Santa Cruz, I went north to Santa Rosa to meet John Tarrant, my favorite Zen master, then south to La Jolla (near San Diego) where I stayed with my old friend Doris, her husband David, and their cat Buster for a few days. A hike up a mountain with spectacular views. Beach walks. The Pacific Ocean. Pelicans. It was warm and sunny, in mid-November.
I still felt California sun in me when I came home to cold Germany.
I’m about to round off my professional life as a freelance programmer in 2022. Two or three smaller regular jobs will continue in some way but I don’t think I will take on another major programming job that will consume most of my time and energy. I’m 68 now, time to retire.
I hope I’ll continue to be mostly healthy. That would leave more time for music – which so far is a hobby for me, not a profession, as Robert Fripp recommends to his students … which enables me to do it just for fun. There is no ambition in me to become ‚better‘ even though I need to practice if I want to be able to play something specific. It feels like a privilege that I can make music with a certain innocence.
2021 felt like I did not have much time for music because my programming life took up too much time – but looking back a bit closer shows that there was actually a lot of music happening: not many gigs and sessions, due to the pandemic, but some did happen, plus there were many occasions when I played for myself, and videotaped/recorded some of it – ‚real‘ music, sketches of compositions, bizarre sound/noise experiments (something that I seem to love a lot), and videos that I took on walks, with music added on later (something else that I seem to love a lot).
So here it is, half an hour of ‚fun with music and noise in 2021‘. Most of the music was created/composed by myself and/or by the friends I played with. The pieces I played with The Absurd were composed by Michael Frank and Göttin Gala. You’ll hear a very short snippet of a Morton Feldman piece that I used for a video. And I played a piece by Steve Hackett that most of you will recognize. Thanks also to Kaki King for the Passerelle.
I hope there will be many more annual videos like this to come. I like this format. I wish more people would put together videos like this, showing some moments of their lives with music.
Guitarist David Torn has popularized (among a few adventurous guitarists, that is) the use of a guitar pick made of stone that is roughened on one side. It can be used like a tiny bow to activate the strings, and if one uses the neck pickup exclusively, the very charming additional effect is that the string length gets shortened – when one puts the stone pick down on the string, the string’s vibrating part gets shorter the more you move the pick up towards the neck. Of course, all the frets no longer fit the shortened string length, so you end up playing notes with pitches that got shifted outside the well-tuned scale, suddenly sounding vaguely middle-Eastern, maybe – exotic, but you can’t quite localize it.
I love this technique but couldn’t really find a suitable stone pick, so one day, I tried a big garnet crystal (an ‘Almandine‘ garnet, to be precise). Its edges are sometimes smooth, sometimes more rough, some are shorter and some longer, so using it as a ‘bowing pick’ adds a bit of unpredictability, which I enjoy.
Garnets are very dense and heavy, typically almost perfect dodecahedron shaped, and because of their beautiful dark red, they were symbols of divine love for the Sufis. I have fond very personal memories related to that – that big beautiful crystal means much more to me than a random object.
Mineralogist Dr. Ahmed cutting a new large almandine garnet for me from its parent rock
I eventually discovered that its sheer weight and smoothness makes it possible to simply put it down on the string to create a clear note. That does not work very well with a stone pick, a glass capo, or other objects – the garnet does this job much better. The string position where I put it down is directly related to the resulting pitch, and of course, when I put down the fingers of my left hand on a fret, that also determines the resulting pitch. While usually, you determine the pitch only using your left hand in a totally predictable way, using the garnet adds another determining factor, forcing you to learn guitar playing in a completely new way. Just having discovered this technique, I am far from being a master of it 🙂 but I confess that I am totally fascinated.
For the big 2020 Livelooping compilation album that I initiated and put on Bandcamp on April 1, 2021, I created a piece of music using a ‚rhythm group‘ consisting of various field recordings, with occasional double bass and drums added. These ingredients went into two synced Echoloop plugins that were in a 6/8 relation. I used four field recordings at a time (plus bass and drums), inserting short random parts of them into the loops by pressing the corresponding buttons on my controller, using Quantized Replace. This resulted in a glitchy kind of groove. And: Synchronized loops of different lengths create polymetric permutations, a technique often used in minimalism. (Starting from 2:50, you can clearly hear two bass notes going through this kind of permutation.)
On top of this, I played a guitar solo using the Almandine garnet crystal.
Because I’d love to get into making music videos more, I took this as an opportunity to create a video. I had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope more videos will follow soon!
The Livelooping compilation for 2020 (with ‚Almandine‘ among its tracks) turned out to be hugely popular, compared to previous compilations. We ended up with 44 tracks, or about 4 hours of livelooping music! I am still amazed by the amount of very diverse creativity and talent collected on this album.
I spent a cold February weekend in 2013 making music with Berlin based synth wizard Bernhard Wöstheinrich who at the time lived in rural northern Germany – near Gütersloh where he shared an office with our common friend, Markus Reuter.
We set up and midi-synchronized our machinery to achieve a certain rhythmic coherence but beyond that, there were absolutely no plans or rules. We started in unknown territory right from the start. The music we created went beyond most preconceived ideas about style and harmony that musicians usually have when performing together.
Now, years later when I listen to these tracks, I really have no idea how they came about and how we found our way through them together. To me, the music often conveys a strong sense of immediacy, of boldness, even of danger. Sometimes we moved in a dangerous balance, sometimes we destroyed that balance deliberately, creating a more open situation again.
For some reason, both of us forgot about these recordings but we remembered them a few months ago. I’m very happy that these sessions with Bernhard finally get released, eight years later and on an equally cold February day.
This strange midi controller called „ZTar“ belonged to Bernhard but he wasn’t entirely happy with it. I had brought my „Yourock“ midi controller which I wasn’t entirely happy with. We decided to swap instruments and were both much happier 🙂 I played the ZTar on track 3 („Iridescent Immediacy“), triggering many virtual keyboards with it – when you hear wild Hammond organs and distorted clavinets, that is me on the ZTar, and towards the end of this track, Bernhard and I both drown in mellotron sounds.
From the liner notes: When you manage to get rid of all expectations and to surrender to true immediacy, there is hardly time to control or plan anything, but you also find that this immediacy can be trusted – in music and in life. It will take you to beautiful places you never knew before.
I met my friend Markus Reuter 30 years ago on a Guitar Craft course with Robert Fripp. We played in a trio with Leander Reininghaus for a few years during the mid-90s, and together with Tobias Reber we even started a record label for algorithmic computer music at one point 🙂
Markus has become a world famous professional musician, composer, music teacher, and instrument designer in the meantime. I felt honored when he interviewed me for his new interview podcast series.
We chatted for more than 90 minutes about my music of course but also about my take on spirituality (and the meaning of ’spiritual inquiry‘) and my life.
In September 2020, sound artist Johannes S. Sistermanns visited me to make an interview for a radio feature about my music.
The feature was on air on January 19, 2021 in SWR2, a German radio station. Big thanks to Mr. Sistermanns for this thoughtful and sensitive musical portrait!
Update: Unfortunately, SWR2 radio have the habit to remove their older shows from the podcast list – it is gone already. Contact me if you want to hear it, I have a recording.
I talked (in German) about my music, what inspires me, and how I usually let it happen on its own, instead of trying to control its direction – and I wondered what the broad range of musical styles that can be found in my output is like for listeners.
Find out for yourself. The music presented in this hour contains abstract computer music, Turkish folkrock, minimalism, ambient, psychedelic rock music, and more. If your brain is wired similar to mine, you will enjoy this. Even if you know some of my music, you will probably hear things you didn’t know.
After we did the interview, we visited Karlheinz Stockhausen on the Kürten graveyard near to my home, and spent a while with him talking about what he meant to us.
On July 18, 2019, my UK friends Michael Bearpark (guitar) and Andrew Booker (drums) travelled to the German Loreley „Night of the Prog“ festival where they performed as part of the Tim Bowness band. On the way they stopped by at my place for a little in-between gig that I had organized at Café Franz in Cologne’s Stollwerck building (thanks to Bernd Keul for helping to make this happen!)
We played two entirely improvised sets although Andrew had prepared some minimalist polyrhythmic patterns on his pads and computer. I remember how much programming he had put into these instruments, turning them into something beautifully unpredictable. He wrote, ‚my usual electronic drums/synth goings-on. Particularly pleased with this gig, as the second half was one long fabulous foray into randomised synth remote-controlling played through the long polyrhythmic delay on the SPD-SX‚. Being a programmer myself, looking at his scripts made me think of ‚rocket science‘.
Michael’s beautifully crafted guitar sounds were flying high above Andrew’s polyrhythms – a way of playing that is an integral part of his band Darkroom. I have no idea how he does it.
How many times have I heard him play? I forgot. We met on various European festivals and concerts over the years – my personal highlight was having Michael, his Darkroom colleague Os, and Andrew Booker play on my own 2011 livelooping festival in Cologne.
Because Michael already played guitar, I played the bass (something I love to do), not without adding some effects, some livelooping, occasional samples from my phone (such as the mysterious voice declaring ‚Number 18 Seed‘), and the short Thumbjam arpeggiator sequence on my iPad at the very end of the long track that begins with this voice.
Listening now, I wish I had sometimes played the bass in a somewhat more restrained kind of way 🙂 I guess I was carried away by the overall hypnotic sound and rhythm.
Andrew Booker, creator of a long series of ‚Improvizone‚ concerts (I had participated in one of the earliest ones in London, back in 2007, also with Michael, Os, and Andrew), has recently started to put the Improvizone concerts on Bandcamp, and after some amount of editing and mixing, he published the entire recording of our Cologne concert here.
Many of my local friends had come to this gig, even my Wales based looping guitarist friend David Cooper Orton and his wife happened to be in the area and came to see us. If you couldn’t come, you can now listen and find out what you have missed!
In October 2018 in Rome, during our final session for „Presence“, an ambient album that has lots of quiet harmony and beauty in it, Fabio and I sometimes deliberately went into the opposite direction. We quite enjoyed doing free form atonal improvisations, so much that we thought our next album might easily be a collection of this kind of music.
Here is a teaser for this hypothetical next album – it contains two atonal improvisations from our last session, together with a one-off harmonic piece that we did in 2015 – I played a somewhat Fripp inspired solo over piano chords Fabio had sent me.
Of course, each one of these three short pieces is a dialogue.
Several times between 2010 and 2018, I spent some time with Italian pianist Fabio Anile at his place in Rome. Fabio and I share a love for ambient music – we improvised every day and recorded everything. It was amazing how easily we found a common musical language.
Michael & Fabio in Penarth (Wales) in 2012
In 2018, we decided to put some of our recordings on an album. Erdem Helvacıoğlu mastered them for us, and Philippe Paulus Jacobus Smeyers contributed a wonderful cover painting. The album ‚Presence‘ got released in December 2019 on the Audiobulb label. Fabio and I are very happy with it.
“Presence” consists of 13 quiet ambient soundscapes for piano, electric guitar, electronics, livelooping, and field recordings. There are no overdubs (except for the field recordings).
“In the early days of burningshed.com, we received very huge amounts of ambient improvised music, much of it very good. Michael Peters’ „Stretched Landscape #1“ nonetheless stood out amongst those. This collaboration with Fabio Anile captures all I loved about that recording and builds on it; its slowly evolving soundscape hovers at the fringes of your attention and quietly brings you into its world. It’s a beautiful thing to hear two musicians who can clearly play well choosing to play so minimally and tastefully” – Peter Chilvers (burningshed.com founding director and Brian Eno collaborator)
„When creating a minimalist album everything has to surrender the approach you take for such an album cannot simply “be made” – it needs a framework in order to make sense of itself. It is nothing you can simply do, right? Hell, no! Sometimes minimalist recordings can be created out of nothing, but only if the people involved know what they do and how they need to do it. Simpletons cannot create minimalist music for improvising such an abstract version of music needs a lot of skill, knowledge, craftsmanship and experience. Fabio Anile and Michael Peters, two very experienced musicians with more than 50 years of making music shared between them, are such connoisseurs and aptly skilled instrumentalists stemming from very different backgrounds. While Fabio was trained in composing and performing classical music, Michael comes from the rather avant-garde corner of punk and direct interaction. Both artists share a sense of closeness when performing together, which they did over a longer period of time. The recording of “Presence” took eight years, probably because they did not follow a pattern but improvised everything together which, of course, is pretty difficult considering you must really get a feel for where your partner “is heading” with this one sound and this one idea. When you combine that with an immense feeling for beauty, for just the right amount of using the elements of Peters’ guitar (looped through some effects and such, sometimes even certain software) or the right pressure on Anile’s keys (also incorporating field recordings of natural sounds) in order to make it sound like a perfect soundtrack to a day off in the dark, newly erect skyscraper before it’s being furnished or amidst the rain in a dense, moss-covered wood with the first rays of sunlight just stretching through the clouds and touching you while simultaneously the last drops splash heavily onto your shoulders and neck. This is a really, really beautiful ambient album made by two musicians who know themselves, their instrument and each other so well that the product inevitably had to be either a forerunner for next year’s album of the year among post-rock and ambient fans or a late dark horse for this year’s lists full of such sounds and spaces.“ – Merchants of Air
For a few years in the mid-1980s, I lived in a half-timbered house (just a mile from where I live now) in the countryside east of Cologne – easily the most romantic place I have ever lived in -, together with a few friends. One of them was Hans Niederberger who today is my neighbour again. He still can’t decide if he is a drummer or a keyboard player 🙂
We had set up a rehearsal room in the basement, with a drumset, many keyboards (including a CP-70 piano and a mellotron – or did the mellotron come later?), and my guitar equipment (including the Revox tape decks that I used for ‚Frippertronics‘ tape loops).
Here in this room, I also recorded the synthesizer loops (using Hans’s synthesizers) that I later called ‚Soaring in Circles‘ (after a poem by Gary Snyder) – at that time I just experimented very innocently, I had no idea that I would eventually release them as a Bandcamp album and people would actually buy it. This was the time before Internet!
When bass player Urs Fuchs moved in in 1983, we started to make more music together, and a project was born that we called ‚Camera Obscura‘. We recorded first versions of ‚Die Reise‘, a kind of suite about the theme of journey.
Last year, I put our old (and never before released) recordings on Bandcamp and called it ‚The First Journey‘. Recorded on a 4-track tape recorder, these pieces sound rough, adventurous, and unpolished compared to the studio versions that we recorded later.
The three parts of the Journey suite were called ‚Time for departure‘ (featuring acoustic guitar patterns that were somewhat influenced by early Genesis pieces), ‚With the Current‘ (a Frippertronics loop), and ‚On new Shores‘ (a drum and bass groove with my guitar solo on top). We also recorded some versions of ambient soundscapes that for some reason were called ‚Also sprach Hans-Heinz‘, a title that was changed to ‚Alle Zeit der Welt‘ on the released album later.
Later that year, we approached Matthias Becker in Cologne who had a recording studio and a small record label that got famous for his ‚Electronic Music from Cologne‘ and ‚Synthesizers from Yesterday‘ sampler series (he owned an enormous collection of synthesizers at the time). We wondered if he might be interested in releasing our homemade recordings.
Matthias did like the music but suggested to do a new recording in his studio, and so we did. The new versions of the music featured sounds from the legendary Fairlight sampler, occasional dreamy voices by Alice Dütsch, drums by Uli Riechert, and I played my first guitar solo using a harmonizer.
In 1984, Matthias released the Camera Obscura album on vinyl, containing the ‚Journey‘ suite, a side-long ambient soundscape called ‚All Time of the World‘, and a beautiful VCS3 synthesizer loop with Gregorian chants on top, composed by Matthias.
Somehow we got into contact with Archie Patterson who ran ‚Eurock‚, a US based magazine and record distributor, specialized in Krautrock and European synthesizer music. He loved our record and wrote this paragraph about it – because of Archie, we sold many more copies in the US than here in Germany. Thank you Archie !!
„Not to be confused with the Belgian/French industrial group of the same name, the debut LP of Germany’s Camera Obscura is one of the most enchanting electronic records of spatial music I’ve heard in a long time. Consisting basically of two synthesists and two guitarists, they set up a soaring soundscape of ethereal ambiance filled with intertwining waves of electronics and guitar tones. Comparison with Fripp/Eno and perhaps Vangelis aren’t too far off, but Camera Obscura lacks both their intellectualism and instead creates a more organic, evolving sound that effortlessly combines softness with heavy dynamics in a breathtaking way. Great stuff, give a listen. One of the all time great German electronic albums (seriously)“
Matthias rereleased the album on CD later, with a different cover image. The Vinyl and the CD are still available from Originalton West, and Burning Shed also sells CD copies.
We only did one live gig – at midnight in a church. And we were featured in the WDR radio, with a live interview in ‚Schwingungen‘, Winfrid Trenkler’s legendary series about synthesizer music. But Camera Obscura stayed a one-off project – we tried to revive it during the 1990s, adding a few other musician friends, but it didn’t quite materialize.
American minimalist composer Terry Riley is one of my big heroes. The reason for this is probably the goosebumps that his early tape based livelooping music gave me when I was young, especially the chorus effect created by layers of soprano sax, and the flurry of organ notes. That did something to my system, a sense of timelessness that I never forgot.
Terry (aged 84) played one gig in Germany on April 18, 2019, in the beautiful Fifties-style Schauspielhaus in Bochum. He was accompanied by his son Gyan, an amazing guitarist. They played one set of about a dozen pieces, some based on compositions, some mostly free, all allowing for a generous amount of improvisation and virtuosity. Terry’s piano chops were truly amazing, his fingers had no problems with big jazzy chords or his fast trademark minimalist patterns.
But the evening’s highlight for me was when he sang – his strong but delicate and fragile voice (that reminded me of Robert Wyatt’s voice that does similar things to me), effortlessly moving along the geometries of Indian melismatics, always had a heartopening effect on me. The encore of the evening was a version of „G Song“, a piece from the early 1970s. Terry couldn’t play the saxophone melody while playing piano so he sang instead – I didn’t get all the words but it moved me a lot, maybe also because I thought that I probably won’t see him again. While I hear that he performs live in California now and then, he hasn’t been to Germany for a long time, and I doubt that he will return. But who knows.
The basement of the Bochum theater hosted something special in addition to the concert: an installation by Terry Riley, an octagon of rooms with mirrored walls that contained microphones and speakers and a computer driven delay system. Sounds created by the audience returned after some seconds, and kept returning. The installation, originally developed for the Magic Theater Show in Kansas in 1968, was called „Time Lag Accumulator III“ – while the original installation was based on tape delay, the new version is programmed in MAX/MSP.
Terry answering questions about „Time Lag Accumulator III“
I made a few minutes of video (in 360°, so be sure to move your screen around to get all perspectives) while walking around in the installation:
I managed to talk to Terry for a few minutes. He noticed my „Terry Riley“ Tshirt (with the cover of „Persian Surgery Dervishes“) and laughed, saying he had no idea these shirts existed.
I even gave him a copy of my „Accumulating Time Lags“ CD. I felt silly, like a teenage rock god fan, but I just had to 🙂
I’m attaching a beautiful article by Tilman Baumgärtel, written for the 2004 „Time Lag Accumulator“ installation in Lille, published in Die Tageszeitung (taz) and translated by David Tushingham:
The Echo Chamber of the Self On the reconstruction of the composer Terry Riley’s only installation
You cannot escape yourself here. Wherever you look you see your own body. The faintest sound is reflected by countless overlapping echoes from various different directions. So that’s what I look like: that’s how I sound. The installation Time Lag Accumulator by Terry Riley is an echo chamber of the self. The minimalist composer created this work in 1968 for the Magic Theater Show exhibition in Kansas City and it has never been shown again since. It is the only work of its kind by Riley who is actually better known as one of the founders of minimalist music and a composer of works made up of strong repetitive patterns. The Time Lag Accumulator was not only the blueprint for the video installations that artists like Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman began their careers with in the early Seventies. Like no other work of its time it also epitomizes Sixties modernism’s fixation with the moment and rejection of grand narratives. After entering through the only door, you find yourself in one of eight rooms whose walls are covered in reflective foil. Microphones are suspended below the ceiling that record every sound and replay these with a slight delay (the „time lag“ of the title) in one of the other rooms. On several occasions you can hear your own voice from different directions. If you shout loud enough, these echoes overlay each other to form a wall of sound that first swells up and then dies away. The repetitions iron out any imperfections in your voice and ultimately all that is left of what you have said is a billowing murmur rather than any meaning. It’s hard to believe that the original version ran with a series of tape loops on tape machines that Riley was also using at the time to create the wildest compositions of his career. Now these artificial echoes are generated by the computer programme MAX. Suddenly it sounds as if a school class of 100 pupils has burst into the room: giggling, screaming and door slamming boom re-soundingly through the octagon, but then only two children run past. Their shouts continue to be heard long after they have gone, and their ever quieter echoes are reminiscent of the sounds of a distant open-air swimming pool or fairground. Then you are left alone again with your own image and your own sound and you can sing a canon in several parts with yourself. Interestingly, this confrontation with the self rapidly leads to a decentralisation of perception while at the same time creating the sensation of being at sea. The Time Lag Accumulator is reminiscent of the „philosophical playthings“ of the 18th and 19th centuries. Then devices such as the „Wheel of Life“ or the „Magic Lantern“ popularised the latest scientific discoveries in a form that was easily understood. The installation is a flawless feedback system as described in the cybernetic world models popular at the time. At the same time it makes physically tangible some of the ideas regarding human perception described by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty who was extremely popular in the Sixties. But above all in its celebration of the here and now all it represents a monument to the „Now Generation“ of the Sixties. The Time Lag Accumulator allows Faust’s beautiful moment to linger: it manages to lend the instant a duration, even if it cannot grant it infinity. By forcing observers back upon themselves, it is also a rejection of any kind of statement or intentionality in art. The Time Lag Accumulator is the epitome of an art that, like minimalism or early conceptual art, refrains from meaning and instead confronts the observer with him- or herself. There you are: there is nothing else.
As wonderful as this band is, none of us is good at self-marketing, so we often end up with one gig per year. At least we have that one gig! The annual The Absurd gig usually happens during the first days of the year at the LOFT in Cologne, and we have done it so often that it has become an institution.
Michael Frank’s wife Vera painted blindfolded this time, translating the music into pictures.
As usual, there was a wide range of musical styles between jazz and rock and punk. Guest artist Max Höfler performed pieces in the local Kölsch dialect, Sercan Özökten sang a sirtaki with Turkish lyrics, there was a very fast free jazz explosion dedicated to Enzo Ferrari, and the evening had some quiet lyrical moments.
My solo guitaret composition ‚With Me Pluck‚ (that we had worked on for quite a while until the tricky rhythmic structure sounded good in a band context) was unfortunately not performed successfully because its quiet pulse disappeared in the stage mix and we got out of sync.
I played a vaguely Mike-Ratledge-y solo during MF’s piece ‚Passing State of Mind‘.
Here is a best-of video, 48 minutes of sonic mayhem. The audience loved it, as always 🙂
00:05 – Reykjavic 2004 06:38 – 520 PS 08:15 – It never rains in Wuppertal (excerpt) 10:22 – Wir warten auf den Entstörungsdienst 15:22 – Passing State of Mind 20:03 – I Love You 24:14 – Benden nefret et ama acıma 27:17 – English Waltz (Procol Harum) 36:01 – Zukka Attakk 44:44 – Du Hengst
Gernot Bogumil: trumpet Matthias Ebbinghaus: vocals, percussion Michael Frank: guitar, vocals Gala Hummel: drums, vocals Michael Hausmann: drums, vibraphone Marcus Jovy: bass Manfred Meurer: drums Sercan Özökten: vocals, percussion Michael Peters: guitar Hans Salz: drums, vibraphone Andreas Wagner: alto saxophone Martin Ziegler: e-piano Martin Zierold: vocals Vera P. Frank: live painting
Uwe Schumacher’s last Klangspielraum concert in October 2018 (with him on bass, percussion, and vocals; Sue Schlotte on cello; and me on guitars) happened to fall on Halloween.
We weren’t costumed and neither was anyone from the audience but I had brought my little screaming gorilla toy and pressed its button now and then. Its hair raising screams filled the church.
I had not met Sue before but I immediately knew she was a professional musician, and very open to experimental music. There weren’t any plans, any preconceived ideas. We hardly talked before the concert. We played for an hour (plus a short more melodic encore), only led by intuition.
The wonderful audience was very attentive, even though the music was completely unpredictable. There were dynamic and intense passages and extremely quiet moments – the presence generated by music and audience was palpable.
Sue had to leave quickly after the concert, so we never got to talk much. Uwe and I had played two or three duo improvisations before together. We both found that it had made a huge difference to have a third musician with us, especially one like this. We were very happy with the music that had visited us, and so was the audience.
The gorilla liked it too and wants to do another gig.
Here is a short teaser video, and underneath, the complete thing if anyone wants to see it. But you had to be there – seeing this on a small screen doesn’t do it justice.
On the last day of September 2017, shortly after my trusty old Mercedes had died an unexpected death while on a music meeting in Czechia, I loaded a rental car with my gear and headed for Solingen, a town 40km north of here that is world famous for its cutlery industry.
The Solingen culture office had invited me to perform at this year’s „Viertelklang“ (quarter sound) festival. Two dozen very different musical acts performed during one evening in five places in the beautiful old „Wald“ quarter of town – a school, a church, a bookshop, an old factory, all in walking distance of each other. Visitors could come and go and experience many kinds of music during that evening.
I was the only act who had a location for myself for the whole evening: an abandoned radio/television shop (Radio Schippers), empty except for the electrical installation, the wall panels, and some old tables. This was possibly the strangest location I’ve ever performed in.
My partner in crime was Florian Zeitler, a musician and prolific video artist whom I had not met before. He created beautiful improvised abstract computer video projections, midi-synced to my improvised music. Before we started, he even programmed sequences that highlighted the white vertical rack mounts on the wall that he projected his images on – we couldn’t take them off that wall, so he turned them into a feature.
There was no real stage – I sat in one corner, Florian sat in another corner, and visitors could walk around the room while we performed. It was dark, the room was lit up by the video projection. It did not really feel like a concert – more like a light and sound installation involving live music. I think we managed to turn the abandoned and somewhat sad location into a magical place for an evening.
The music that I played mostly consisted of experimental sound collages, involving some of my field recordings, ambient, psychedelic, and minimalist livelooping music, guitar, synthesizers, granular synthesis, artificial voices, speech fragments (some of my dear friend Rick Walker, I used them without asking him, oops). I had set up four speakers for a quadrophonic setup and could make all sounds move around the room in various ways. This was a new experience for me and one that I quite enjoyed.
We played three 30 minute sets with 30 minute intermissions. Not a lot of people showed up unfortunately – the shop was a little further away from the other locations, and maybe the experimental/avantgarde description in the flyer did not attract as many people as the jazz, blues, folk, and classical music that was performed in the other locations (which seemed to be much more popular). But Florian and I quite enjoyed ourselves, and as usual, several more adventurous people showed up and told us afterwards how much they had liked this.
I wish I could do things like this more often!
Here is a 36 minute mix of the evening. My cheap camcorder does not do Florian’s videos justice but maybe you get an idea what it was like. Lean back and listen loud.
Late October, driving from Arcos de la Frontera to El Bosque and Grazalema where we hiked in the Andalucian mountains. The beauty of this place instantly put me into a Jon-Hassell-Mati-Klarwein mode, like beautiful mediterranean places often do.
The music is a Fourth-World-style harmonized guitar improvisation that I played a couple of years ago.
The livelooping tour that some of my friends did this spring (concerts and workshops in Paris, Florence, Brescia, Prague, Dresden, and Berlin) ended in Berlin, with the fourth Berlin International Livelooping Festival, organized by Leander Reininghaus.
I was supposed to play another [mi,mi] guitar duo here with my friend Michael Frank but unfortunately he had to stay home because of health problems in his family, so I had to play alone.
Somehow the idea of looping with stomp boxes, as we do with [mi,mi], stuck in my head and that’s what I found myself doing … although I could also have done the digital loop thing, playing alone. Musically it was big fun to use stomp boxes, but my suitcase that I took on the train – containing my little red guitar and lots of metal pedals – was so heavy when I had to carry it up and down the stairs in the Cologne train station (some parts of which doesn’t feature lifts) that I felt very sorry for this decision quickly.
Luckily, I was picked up by my friend Volker in Berlin, we did a beautiful walk through the parks in Kreuzberg, and had fabulous Indian food.
And I could stay for the two nights with my old pal Markus Reuter. Here he enjoys our first breakfast together:
On the day of the festival I visited Berlin’s music instrument museum which showed a special exhibition about the history of electronic music. There was a local website with more information but I wish the exhibits had had headphones with sound examples or even videos. So it was all a bit sparse, but seeing all those magical pieces of gear was wonderful anyway. Theremin, Ondes Martenot, Trautonium, Hugh LeCain’s tape recorder keyboard, Fairlight CMI, Synclavier … and many classical synthesizers were there, plus the first drum computers … there is something about old analog equipment that is utterly fascinating for some reason.
The livelooping evening was opened by none other than Gary Hall who happened to be in town on that day for the Superbooth synthesizer fair. Gary was the inventor of the legendary Lexicon PCM42, one of the first groundbreaking digital livelooping devices.
Bodo Orejuela’s quite wonderful cymatics light show (of water vibrating with the sound) accompanied the livelooping acts, of which there were so many that everyone could perform for only 20 minutes – but that made it all even more entertaining.
My own set featured my trusty red Hohner GT2 guitar and various sound manglers. Livelooping was done by the relatively new Montreal Assembly „Count To 5“ pedal which does amazing tricks that are very addictive, followed by a 20 year old Digitech PDS-8000. I used three different distortion/fuzz boxes, sometimes all at once, so the sound was raw, even a bit brutal at times. Wonderful 🙂
As usual, I had only thought about (not even „planned“) the first 30 seconds of my improvisation. Often when I plan to do something on stage, I find that it doesn’t quite work the way I thought it would, and instead, it develops into something completely different. This has happened so often that have given in now, instead only trusting my momentary impulses and my intuition. That feels just right to me. During the recent livelooping gigs I did in Paris and now in Berlin, it worked out well enough to be interesting or even beautiful to the audience. It makes me trust this when people come to me afterwards and tell me how great it was (of course, people who didn’t like it usually don’t come to me to tell me). After my sets, I usually have almost no memory of what I did. Something about this is very funny.
Nelly Meunier tried to videotape my set but of course it was too dark for my cheap camera. The sound was recorded with a microphone, including pedal clicks and audience noise.
On the next morning, we all met again for the traditional loopers brunch before we said goodbye to each other. A core group of five loopers will spend the night in my house on their way back from Berlin to Paris (for three of them the trip will continue to California and Japan). Then this particular adventure ends. I feel very privileged and happy to have been part of it.
„Paris Spring Loops“ was the title of this year’s international livelooping festival, organized by Nelly Meunier and Emmanuel Reveneau. The festival lasted for a week and contained several loop workshops and concerts in several venues (and the logistics were complex).
Nelly and Manu had scheduled me for a workshop or two (I showed the students some of what can be done with the 25 year old Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro) and for four concerts – three solo shows and one duo with my „The Absurd“ band colleague Michael Frank (who also did a wonderful solo set).
I was very happy during this week, although there was little sleep and lots of standing in traffic jams, and not much time for tourism, except for one little trip to Pigalle and Montmartre. The Paris spring sun was warming my body, and meeting my old friends again (and getting to know a few new ones), and spending lots of time with them, was heartwarming. The concerts were all interesting, some of them mouth-open breathtaking, and my own (completely improvised) concerts all came out nicely – people liked them and I was quite happy with them – so happy that I put the three solo loops on this Bandcamp album without any edits:
Cover photograph: Olivier Malhomme
The first show was based on my digital setup: Plogue Bidule with various plugins, this time controlled by a Novation Launchcontrol which felt much more stable than the pair of Nanokontrols I had been using for years. You can see me controlling loops and effects on this video of the show:
I also videotaped the second and third solo shows but hadn’t chosen a good camera position (my head is cut off on the videos) 🙂 but you can listen to them on the Bandcamp album. Both featured the „Frippertronics“ tape delay instead of the computer, plus various stomp box delays.
photograph: Joel Gilardini
The 50+ year old tape technique (more about it here) produces some amount of hiss but several people told me that they actually liked that hiss – something about it being analogue and warm. Not sure about this, but it is a package deal I guess, and people loved this thing.
It sure looks awesome, especially during the final concert where I put it into the center stage and it looked like an altar – a loop altar. Which made my colleague John Connell fall on his knees and pray to it 🙂
The international livelooping scene, organized around the festivals that were started 17 years ago by Rick Walker (purple-haired this time) in California and have since spread to many cities, consists of a very friendly bunch of people. There is no competitiveness at all, and everyone is totally respected with their individual way of expressing themselves with loop music, regardless of the level of professionality (which varies wildly of course). The „newbies“ who learned about livelooping during our workshops and did a few sets themselves probably felt safe on stage because of this friendliness.
I’m getting used to improvise on stage more and more but while I learn to trust the unknown, and show my not-knowing without safety net, I still quite enjoyed the friendly feedback and encouragement that I got during this week. Sometimes I’m still surprised at how much some people love what I do 🙂
Some people even liked this relentlessly adventurous guitar duo with Michael Frank:
A week that made me happy … while I write this, I think of 8 of my looper friends who got themselves squeezed into a van, with all their suitcases and gear, and continue a little tour of Europe – today, they are in Florence, then later in other places in Italy, then in Prague, Dresden and finally Berlin where I will meet them again. After that, the van will travel through Cologne back to Paris. What an adventure! I’m glad though that I can sleep in my own bed again, life on the road is too hard for me 🙂
Photos by Laure Sornique, Olivier In-Mobile Malhomme, Joel Gilardini and me:
Another wonderful new year’s concert by The Absurd at Cologne’s LOFT.
On this saturday, the streets were so icy in Cologne that I saw several people slip and fall during the few minutes I was out to have some food after soundcheck. Police issued a level 3 ice warning (I had no idea that there are levels of this): people should stay at home if possible, so we were afraid that we would play in front of an empty room. But apparently, our fans love us so much that they risk their bones! the room was almost as full as usual when we started to play.
My favorite tune of the night was a new piece called ‚Reykjavík 2004‘. It was based on an improvisation recorded in 2004 with guitarist Michael Frank on bass and me on guitar, plus Manfred Meurer on drums. ‚Manni‘ had been the Absurd drummer during their beginning, more than 30 years ago, and he was supposed to play drums at this gig but sadly, he couldn’t come. Göttin Gala replaced him on drums and did a great job.
Why have I never before composed anything for The Absurd? I should do that, it is so much fun hearing your ideas played by a bunch of great musicians.
This composition was a collaboration between Michael Frank (who came up with the bass line and the strange somewhat Magmaesque trills, and who had the idea for the furioso end of the piece) and me (chords and melody). I am grateful that Michael insisted that our seemingly sparse 2004 ideas were interesting enough to turn them into a piece, and that I could see how effortlessly he structured them. He is a music educator and knows what he is doing. There is still so much to learn for me! Although I strongly believe in the value of not knowing in music making, I see that knowing is of great value as well 🙂
People liked this piece a lot, and the more I listen to it, the more I like it as well.
Gernot Bogumil – tr
Michael Frank – g, voc
Vera P. Frank – voc
Göttin Gala – dr, voc
Michael Hausmann – vibes, dr
Max Höfler – g, voc
Kim Jovy – reeds
Marcus Jovy – b
Sercan Özökten – voc, perc
Michael Peters – g
Hans Salz – dr, vibes, perc
Andreas Wagner – reeds
Norbert Zajac – voc
Martin Ziegler – p
Today’s walk: Unterbersten-Frangenberg-Müllersommer, starting near Landhaus Fuchs and to the left into the deep forest, then along the long path through Müllersommer and up back through the fields towards the car. It took an hour or two but I walked slow, as I do when I’m alone, often sitting somewhere and enjoying. It was cold and blue but I had my hardcore winter coat and felt comfortable. The beauty of the frosty meadows and the wide vistas, and the deep silence eventually brought my mind to a stop. And there were these guys in the rusty car.
jazz standard not sure if I’d want to get into this car with these guys I looked around and saw 20 vapor trails
A late December morning with a cold blue sky and sunshine. Computer work waits for me but there is enough time for a little meditating and a walk. My soul felt different afterwards, thankful and quiet. I seem to get the hang of this more and more as I get older. There is this image of an old man sitting in the sun with his cat, content, quiet, at peace with himself, not having to save the world any more. I would like to be like that. Getting closer to it already.
Binaryminds is a software company that I sometimes work for. For the 2016 winter holiday season, they sent greeting cards to their customers – but not ordinary cards! The packages contained Google Cardboard sets – virtual reality headset kits made out of cardboard. You need to put your smartphone into them to watch 3D scenes.
The 3D scene that the binaryminds customers were pointed to contained season’s greetings – „keep calm and holiday on“ – set in a computer generated winter landscape. And there is sound, done by me, a six minute ambient winter soundscape. I am totally in love with the sights and sounds of this.
If you watch this in a browser on your desktop computer, you can move around using your mouse. If you use a tablet or mobile phone (it needs a gyroscope/compass to work), just move around. Of course, the best version is a virtual reality headset. (If you only see two parallel static images, your device doesn’t support the 3D view)
click on the image to launch the VR landscape
Of course the soundtrack was done with a nod to mastermind Brian Eno, inventor of this kind of musical aesthetic. Eno was the one who came up with the term „ambient music“ in the 70s, and some of his ambient soundscapes evoked a sense of place, an inner landscape. He often used this music as an acoustic backdrop to his visual art exhibitions. The result was always pure magic.
When multiinstrumentalist and livelooper Rick Walker started doing the first international livelooping festivals in California 15 years ago, he probably had no idea that this thing would eventually spread like wildfire. We are doing several such festivals per year now, in many countries, and more are added to the list every year.
There is a growing scene of livelooping artists some of which travel around the world to perform on the various festivals. Unless there are sponsors, the artists usually pay for everything out of their own pockets, because this is not a commercially successful enterprise – it is just about the love for music. And the audience is fascinated every time by the wide range of styles and ideas, the musical quality, the surprising creativity they get to see.
Steve Moyes, a livelooping guitarist/cellist from Wales (who had performed on my 3rd festival in Cologne), had organized such a festival in November 2016. Eight musicians from the UK, France, and Germany met in Cardigan, a little town at the southwestern coast of Wales, for a very enjoyable afternoon/evening of livelooping music.
Most of us stayed for several days. Steve cooked for us, and we were hosted by Maggie Nicols, a singer from the UK improvised music / free jazz scene. I remembered Maggie’s voice from early 1970s Keith Tippett projects such as Centipede, and I was thrilled that I could stay in her large house, an old mill building, and get to know her.
My Wales trip started with some technical problems, including a faulty Midi controller, and an expensive laptop that suddenly refused to boot (update: after the UK trip when I came home, it was suddenly alive again as if nothing had happened – my computer technician has no explanation except that it maybe didn’t want to travel to Wales). Instead of the laptop, which is usually a central item in my livelooping setup, I used my iPad with a combination of livelooping, effect, and granular synthesis apps, all of this to create textural loops, plus an oldfashioned but still amazing Gibson Echoplex for shorter loops. Also, Steve gave me his Line6 DL-4, a workhorse for delays and looping.
One day before the concert, I put new strings on the guitar, and one of the tuning pegs broke – I could no longer tune the A string, but after some experimenting, I fixed it, sort of, by squeezing a clothes peg under the string. I could have borrowed another guitar but I felt stubborn at this point. After all, my cheap trusty Höfner Shorty is something special, with its integrated amplifier/speaker which allows for wild feedback orgies.
The evening was beautiful, even breathtaking at times. I loved Steve Moyes’s cello loops and his abstract, sculptural approach. Heather Summers played beautiful pieces with her warm violin sound in the middle of things, and David Cooper Orton delivered a number of his masterful guitar pieces. Nelly Meunier’s ‚prehistoric‘ sounds from stones, bones, leaves and other beautiful little objects were a quiet sonic meditation, and ecnegrU’s skillful reggae/dub explorations blew my mind and made me dance. Julia Kotowski’s songs (as ‚Entertainment for the Braindead‘) have become even more perfect since I saw her in California, 7 years ago, and Emmanuel Reveneau (‚Lucid Brain Integrative Project‘) was as lucid and amazing as always. What a great group of musicians! I felt thrilled that I could be one of them on this evening.
Somehow my technical problems led me to play more radically, much more in the noise department, and I quite enjoyed it (and so did a number of people in the audience – never before so many people came and told me how much they had liked my set).
On the next evening, we staged a mini festival with short sets personally for Maggie Nicols because she had performed in Austria on the festival day, and missed it. I played even more radically this time and enjoyed it even more (Emmanuel found it ’supercool‘). What has happened? I feel that while I am open to many kinds of styles, including ambient and psychedelic which would typically focus on ‚beautiful‘ sounds, I suddenly feel much more drawn to experimental sounds and structures, to noise, to uncertainty, to go beyond all borders. It was almost like a little epiphany. Playing freely like this felt so natural, so clearly like me. And I feel a little bit like a newborn, I still have to learn so much.
After our little mini-festival for Maggie, we did a collective improvisation. It was wild and ecstatic at times, and hearing Maggie’s voice soaring above it just like it did 45 years ago (with Centipede on their immortal ‚Septober Energy‘ album) really gave me the goosebumps big time! I played like never before, sometimes including granular synthesis. I discovered that I could put my unconnected iPad on top of the guitar, feeding its speaker output through the guitar picks and the guitar signal chain with its effects and loops. Wow!
Looking forward now to how my music wants to develop. I let it do that by itself, as always. It will take care of itself.
„Das Hertz“ was a free-improvisation, jazz/rock/experimental band that existed between 2006 and 2009:
Martin Ziegler – keyboards
Michael Peters – guitar
Guido Erfen – bass
Wolfgang Dieckmann – drums
We only did one or two gigs but we recorded lots of sessions in the rehearsal room – not in a real professional way, we just put a stereo digital recorder somewhere to document our efforts.
Sometimes we kept searching for the muse, but very often, the music really took off. Too bad the audience was so small, it really was a great band at times! There is 1970s Jazzrock in the mix … a healthy dose of Krautrock … the sounds of Progressive Rock sprinkled all over … and very often, a main ingredient is sheer madness.
We usually played as a quartet, occasionally with some guests, but some of the albums/podcasts were recorded on days without Martin, our genius piano player – we were in power trio territory then, and that was always a very special experience for me.
Luckily Guido, our bass player, spent a considerable amount of work turning these recordings into two albums („initial“ and „electric gentry“) and after that, into quasi-albums that he called ‚podcasts‘. He edited the recordings, did lots of mixing and mastering, he invented track titles, and he created artwork (being a painter, he did a very creative job). And as a programmer, he created the official Das Hertz website, putting all the recordings on archive.org, under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike-Licence.
I recently listened to some of the recordings on archive.org and for some reason, the site had problems streaming on that day. So I decided, being a fan of Bandcamp, to put everything on Bandcamp as well. So now, you can listen to the complete archive of Das Hertz on Bandcamp if you wish.
And I made a selection of my favorite tracks. I called it „M-Theory„. You know, guitar strings, string theory, and my first name. Some of the tracks still really amaze me. My own playing amazes me, it is often something I couldn’t reproduce, something that I couldn’t do on my own – I need a great band like this to catalyse my muse into coming out and doing this.
The first track („Hunting the Drama Waltz“, whatever that means) is a lengthy improvisation that features the power trio – Guido and Wolli, the rhythm group, laying out a fast relentless harmonically open groove for me to take off in whichever direction I wanted to fly. On this piece I play guitar but also guitar-midi-driven virtual keyboards.
photograph: Joel Gilardini
