Some interesting stuff
Electronic Music is different. Today the term "electronic music" is occupied by the most distinct music, whenever it uses electroacoustic or electronic instruments. So the primordial meaning of that term is almost forgotten.
EM usually is put equal to the popular styles or to the so called "Berlin School" around the artists Klaus Schulze and the German formation Tangerine Dream. And - may be - to one or the other it is connected to Kraftwerk and their unique sound. Or it is equated to meditative Music, New Age … Synthpop also and the wide range of technomusic with all its individual descendands.
EM usually is put equal to the popular styles or to the so called "Berlin School" around the artists Klaus Schulze and the German formation Tangerine Dream. And - may be - to one or the other it is connected to Kraftwerk and their unique sound. Or it is equated to meditative Music, New Age … Synthpop also and the wide range of technomusic with all its individual descendands.
What the heck is electronic music?
Electronic Music in it´s primordial meaning however- distinguishes itself from music being produced with mechanical instruments
- is emphasizing sound above structure and form
- is annihilating european and noneuropean scales of tones and intervals
The music you can explore on these pages is a hybrid form in this respect as well: for the most part you will find european scales of tone, you will find the "4 to the floor". And you will find bits of sound, sounding like real instruments, like piano or harpsichord.
Anyhow: all these sounds are generated electronically, except a guitar-riff here and there maybe. Many of my compositions have a structure, they develop whilst they are changing speed and key.
Also they include elements of the "classical electronic music" as mentioned above, where sound is above things like structrue, melody, beat or tonal orientation.
A Concert of 634 years duration and 12 keys for John Cage
Today it is a given standard to any keyboarder around the world, that his instrument is equipped with seven white and five black keys per octave. This is also a given standard to all synthesizers – as far as they are played or controlled by a keyboard.But: there where times, when the distribution of tones across a keyboard was not standardized the way we know it today. The first keyboard featuring this modern aspect of its design was implemented in the Halberstadt Cathedral during the year 1361. It was a truly revolutionary technique these days.
In the year 2000 – that means exactly 639 years after the invention of the modern keyboard – there was a handful of people bothering about the question, how long can a composition last? They concluded, that it may not be possible to play any piece of music longer than the lifetime of the instrument it is performed on. In case of an organ it is the hypothetical lifetime of 639 years. So they started the concert that will have exactly this duration. Performed is the composition „Organ2 / As Slow As Possible“ by John Cage. – Following his tempo-instruction in the most literally sense of the word. Click -> this to read more about this unbelievable concert.
Enthusiasm for electronic music
It was a long way to go ... for electronic music to achieve its popular, global prevalence as known nowadays. It was a long way to go from the first steps with monsterous machinery to the sounds of our modern society. And so there is a long list of pioneers, who had to overcome resistance. Many of them prepared their contribution to this overwhelming development during times of ignorance and when they where considered as kinky crank nerdy weirdos.This page is to give a glipse of how many people where dedicated to electronic music, even a long time before any of us was born. To give an impression of what the early days where like, I would like to tell the following story:
Think about the ringtones of mobile phones, all the beeps and blimps of all the little helpers in our households, cars and in our computers. Not even an eggboiler without beeping his mood and status loudly. Hard to imagine, that first developments of electrified soundgeneration go back in time until the early 1870ies. A man named Elisha Gray invented the "musical telegraph", and even performed a concert in 1874 with that invention. (See the article below).
Some 20 years later, Thaddeus Cahil developed in 1897 the so called Teleharmonium. This was a heavy-duty machine, with a weight of 7 tons, generating electronic sounds by using rotating gearwheels. And its successor, the patented socalled Dynamophone was even more monsterous: 200 tons of wires, cogwheels and transformers ... designed to feed music directly into the telephonegrid ! This is an astounding parallel, just think about the modern ways of distributing music. To learn more about the timeline of EM, click here. If you feel, that I forgot someone or you find a mistake in the following data, please don´t hesitate to contact me and I will be pleased to add new items or correct any mistake.
Music meets poetry or what about the babelfish-collection
Very often accidential events and erratic incidents start to develop influence on things. One of these erratic incidents was the visist of two innocent Dubliners in our village during the last summer. We had a nice time at our local vine festival. And as I was looking for native english speakers, I immediateley convinced them to recite some poems in front of my microphone. So I now own some recorded versions of poems by Robert Graves.And as I startet to create a first composition featuring one of those poems (Always) ... I developed the idea to dedicate the whole next album to this brilliant writer and poet. So actually I am working on my afternext album with the title Electron, dedicated to Robert Graves.
If you are an native british english speaker - reagardless of your gender - you are cordially invited to become part of this project: I am continuously seeking for people to declaim poets by Robert Graves, make a record of it and make this record available to me. If you like to join this idea: for you it is very easy, to set poetry to music !
1. Take one (or more) poems by Robert Graves (you can make your own choice!)
2. Declaim this in front of a microphone.
3. Send the record to me. No matter what file-format.
4. Give me the information about the source you took it out.
5. Thats it.
As my project is not a profitable one, I can not pay any moneys for your efforts. If you want to be part of this undertaking, you will do it for arts sake only, for the sake of poetry and for the sake of music! - It is neither neccessary nor possible to generate complicated legal contracts: Once you sent a record to me, the copyrights belong to me, and I can decide whether I will use it or not; and I can decide in what context (musically) I will put it. As a small service in return you will be credited on my "credits"-page; thats all that I can do for you. - Anyhow I feel that this is an intention, worth to become a part of, inspite of the fact that there is no money in.
Download some of my cover-artwork
Now you can download my cover-artworks to use it as a wallpaper on your computer. For the time beeing there are two of them available. Click the name of the picture above to download it straigth down to your machine.NEBULA (1680x1050)
APHELION (1680x1050)
NEBULA (1280x1024)
APHELION (1280x1024)