Imagine the words “What have I become?” out of Johnny Cash’s mouth. This is what’s left of my thoughts after one wonderful concert: Peter Broderick and Nils Frahm. Again, just as with Hauschka’s concert, it took me down to earth. Being there, sucking in the atmosphere it makes everything else so obsolete.
Music is about people. Music is between people. Real people. Music is about moments. Creating moments, sharing moments. Recordings are the attempt to capture the moment. Fail.
All the “the-internet-is-so-great-for-musicians”-evangelists have all one big, big misconception. The same way as good music comes from the countryside and is performed in the cities, good music comes from no-internet-land. (yes, well… and distributed over the web)
The internet, with all its “hello”s, “have you seen”s and “*ping!* you’ve got a new ***”s, eats up your mind. Or lets say your creativity. Or maybe just your intrinsic motivation expressing yourself through music. It’s not good to see, that there are tons of guys all making the same stuff. It’s not good to see your idea being around everywhere else. It is just not good being referenced all the time.
After a Broderick/Frahm concert I accuse myself. You are being a person, that spins his activity around the net. You were a person spinning your activity around music. What have you become?
I am a little proud of this one. Yesterday we released our first Dåbermann-Mix. Give it a listen and download here:
“Now wait!”, you might ask. “What is Dåbermann? Who is ‘we’? And why proud?”
Okay, I’ll do some clarification:
We, that are Chris, Hamer and me. We met earlier this year to mess with 3 laptops using Ableton. The only thing we knew was, that we have a great overlap in musical interest. Didn’t know what will happen when we start out a jam, also didn’t expect anything. Dåbermann was born.
After the first session we were really surprised. In a positive way. Right from the first minute – it seemed – we had found our sound and roles for each one. Also interesting to see how 3 approaches to Ableton melt down in one atmosphere. Chris, with his trackpad-rocking chaos-style, does all the groove and beat. Hamer is most likely the guy who does strings and ambiences. I focussed so far on live-sampling: playing guitar, sometimes trumpet, a bit voice and making general noises.
Improvising with Ableton is really another paradigm than improvising in a band. While in a band, there is just the moment, you always act “now”. With Ableton, it’s like you create a big and heavy ball and give it a push, so it starts rolling on its own. Once in a move you can start change its colour or shape, give it a little more movement or make it pause. But it is still that big monster being hard to handle, since it’s the child of three computers.
After the first sessions we had plenty of material. Several hours. And we didn’t really know what to do now. Make tracks from it? No we couldn’t. No way to reproduce the sounds. They got lost on the way. So we decided to chop up the sessions and glue them together in a digestable way. So out of 3 hours of improvised Dåbermann-sessions emerged 32 minutes of Dåbermix.
And this is one of the reasons I’m really proud of this: the source material is improvised and still it sounds great (in my ears). This is the inversion of the usual process of producing tracks. Normally you have an idea, and shape it until you like it. The actual work you do is pushing boxes on a grid in a program. Not very musical. This time we just jammed out. And it worked.
I once again felt what’s so great about making music with other people: the outcome is always more than the sum of its elements.
It is most likely, that you will hear more of us in the future. We plan more sessions, but also performing live someday. So stay tuned…
PS. Actually, all three of us don’t like dogs. There are exceptions, but you know in this ever-going “dogs vs. cats”-fight, cats will always win. Find us on Soundcloud and MySpace.
Now I want everybody to take out their mobile phones and take a picture of me.
Now I want everybody to take the person next to you and send him a text message.
Now I want everybody to take the person next to you and kiss.
1… 2… 3… kiss!
Now make a bass sound!
Yesterday I attended Frankfurt’s Club “Robert Johnson” to be part of Matthew Herbert’s next record. Working title “One Club”. It will be made entirely of sounds collected yesterday evening. Everyone attended will be in the booklet and receive a copy of the album. I’m really excited and looking forward to the result.
Oh, did I mention that Herbert has always been a big inspiration for me? This guy somehow opened my ears to the music and rhythms surrounding us everyday. He has always been innovating and keeps on doing so.
Another next album of his will be made entirely from sounds of a pig. It was born a month ago and he will record-follow it through its life. Crazy person! In a good way !
