Music
Hi there.
A home studio is always very handy in case inspiration strikes.
Here a brief summary about all the Musical stuff I have been doing during the last decades until now. It started when I was 5 or so. My family discovered there lives a piano teacher in the flat above us. Soon we made friends and I always had a lot of fun hammering on her piano when we were invited over. Very soon after, it was decided I should learn to play the piano. We got a Wurlitzer piano. Not an organ, a real acoustic upright piano. So then, my musical career started and after consumption of four different teachers (one of them for a year in between, he was a Jazz pianist who taught me some interesting tricks, the other teachers were classical piano teachers whom I learnt the basics from) I stopped taking classes at the age of 17. During that time of “formal” piano education I had (among others) a nice repertoire of Rachmaninov, Chopin, Debussy and John Cage: the performance of the latter’s piece “Music for Marcel Duchamp” even got me a price at the “Jugend Musiziert” competition. John Cage’s philosophy of music and sound stuck with me since then. What I liked most about piano playing was improvisation. At some point my desire to only play improvised music so completely took over, that I became unteachable for any piano teacher.
As time passed on, I continued my piano improvisations, but also I got more interested in the less intellectual and more social dimensions of music makery. I wanted to form or join a band. Since at the age of 17 my taste in music listening was entirely Heavy Metal, and an existing School band didn’t want me to join (because I only played the piano and I wasn’t quite the kind of school kid that qualiefied as “cool”), so i simply founded my own hardcore metal band consisting of myself and the piano. By that time the family, had gotten an electronic piano which had a 2-track midi recorder built in and some basic choice of samples. It was my first music project and In the year of the Lord 1996 the recordings were made using a cassette recorder and plastic microphone. Here is one of those recordings.
(The Moschus-Oxen: Moschus-Oxen and Bambussprossen. Piano and Vocals)
Further-on, on my 19th birthday my family gave me a guitar. A basic nylon string guitar from Czech Republic. At first I was a bit irritated: “But I don’t play the guitar! I play the piano.” But then, anyway, I got interested and started playing the guitar, fumbling with it on a daily basis without taking any lesson. Soon, I could improvise on it quite well. Due to a coincidence soon after I had the chance to play the bass guitar for the first time in some sort of camp for civil service education, where one of the “leisure” activities was music workshops and playing in a Band, I of course instantly signed up for. It was a lot of fun to play the bass, and very quickly I decided I want one. Also, to figure it out properly, I took lessons from Freiburg’s International Music College (formerly known as Jazz&Rock-Schule Freiburg). After a year I was ready to join a rock band, called the “Borderline Cooperation Ltd.”, which was at quite high level. Unfortunately the project got stuck after another year, maybe because we didn’t somehow get out of the rehearsal room.
Next, I founded my first own band “Disadvantage” together with some friends from the University (meanwhile I had started studying Computer Science at Freiburg University).
A CD cover design for Disadvantage showing Lisa, our vocalist. (At the time the CD cover was made we still didn't have any CD of course).
Here are two recordings, ordered chronologically. We first had a male singer, then a female one.
(The infamous “Default Song” we called that because we played it in every rehearsal. Donfelice on the mike.)
(The “Suffocate” song, with Lisa on vocals. Seems like we made progress getting some sound out of the amps.)
During that time, I also made a lot of experimental recordings partly on my own, partly with support from other guitar players. Here, some examples.
(Somewhat hispanic soundig piano and guitar composition, making use of a wicked 9/8 rythm)
(The lush and tropical atmosphere of Hawaii, as we interpret it with bass and Toby on guitar)
(This song fragment I recorded with a mobile studio on the french coast of Lake Geneva. It also represents the atmosphere: imagine a large lake surrounded by mountains with clear, cold water).
Also during the time with Disadvantage, we formed a little side project called “Saitenreiter”. Two classical guitars and one bongo drummer. Great stuff. The web site seems to be online still, unfortunately there are no recordings (but 2 pictures). It also was a nice way to earn money because in this trio we were often invited to play at exhibitions and local politicians festivities. See http://saitenreiter.de.vu/
In 2004, I joined the rock band “Van Dalton”. Here some flyers we made for live concerts:
Also, some nice recordings were made with this band. With Courtesy to/from Van Dalton here some very nice recordings. The band was definitely more of an on-stage beast, but at last we managed to also make some recordings.
(“Freiheit” – A somewhat dark song with lots of keyboard sounds, and a formidable guitar solo at the end)
(This Song Tells The Truth. The flagship song of Van Dalton.)
(“Maybe Baybe”, for this song we invested some more time in mixing and mastering)
On the side, I also made some experimental recordings, sometimes just by myself, sometimes with help of Steve the main guitar player of the Daltons:
(“Gamble”, with me on piano and bass, and Steve playing guitar)
(“In control”, with Steve on guitar)
(“Romania”, this is how Romania sounds, in my imagination. With me on guitar.)
(“Mechatron”, a dark and synthetic ballad)
Then, I left Van Dalton, to go to Vienna, where I got a job as assistant at one of the universities there. Of course, after the first excitement with the job subsided, I again wanted to make music. So I joined the group “Lost in Majority” (klick this link for some recordings). Here is a picture from a great concert we had in Vienna’s 16th district:
After 2 years, I decided to move back to Germany, this time to Aachen. There, I first tried my luck with a super hardcore metal band, but probably I lost my bite somewhat, so I decided to do my own stuff of which some examples are listed below. In the meantime I also re-grouped with some nice musicians to work on a couple of songs which will be presented on 3rd of November in Aachen’s Wild Rover Club.
Here some self-made material.
(“Bukanisator”, an excursion into the bleak depths of industrial electronic sounds)
(“Triton”, a funky song fragment with emphasis on bass guitar)
(“The Frayer”, exhibiting textures and pads, forming somewhat of a hypnotic sound).
and the newest:
(“Seaweed”, a song that makes you feel like Sushi if you listen to it very closely).
