With my piano piece Ursulurn, I happen to be one of them. Thanks a lot, Frank!
The music over there is somewhere between ambient, downtempo, drone and experimental. If you’re interested give it a listen through my Cloud-Playlist for an uninterrupted playback. (you’ll need a Google-Account, though)
I like and support the idea not just because the underlying thoughts are quite similar to mine, when I started ‘Found in the Cloud’. It is good to see Soundcloud evolving, being a platform driven by people. And with applications like The Cloud Player build ontop of the infrastructure, it has the potential to be Spotify for independent artists.
I just removed Mixed Sessions from the internet. It is really old and has nothing to do with what i’m up to musically. I don’t want to get connected to this Garageband-approach of making electronic music. There are better things to come…
If anybody still has the desire to listen to the tracks, shoot me a message, I’ll pass you the files.
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.
Since my last band split up two years ago, my solo-endeavours were nearly the only musical activity I followed. Looking back on the results of that last period, I must say, that there is not too much output. There is Mixed Sessions, which I now can’t really listen to anymore, since it’s so old and kind of nooby and dilettantish in some regards (excluding These Days)
And there is LifeB, which got signed to Om Records. And then? Some experiments here and there – that’s it.
But why? Why didn’t I manage to put my musical ideas (which I guess are still there and vital) into actual pieces you can listen to?
Last weekend it became clear, that it was form. In the days of playing in bands everything was quite fixed. The band setup consisted of drums, bass, two guitars and vocals. I was one guitarist with some songwriting-responsibilities. Time I spent for the band was either practicing guitar, writing songs or riffs and attending rehearsals. Note: 100% of that time is directly connected to music. 100% of my ideas were direct musical ideas.
Now switching to music done with the computer. Just adding this device into your music makes everything a lot more complicated. You have to question everything that was kind of pre-set in your band. What kind of music do you want to do? What is your sound? How do you perform this music? Adding to that, computer is technology. And technology needs to be adapted to your needs. So you have to learn about programs, underlying principles and interaction-patterns. These topics are all barriers in your way of developing musical ideas.
And this is the reason I look back on not too much output. I did not find answers that satisfied me. So I looked further. More energy and time was consumed dealing with stuff surrounding music than focussing on actual music.
Hopefully this will change now. I finally found a setup that fits my needs. A first version of a setup, that is Ableton-centered but not screen-centric. Actually I can turn off the screen and put the laptop aside.
It makes use of all of the MIDI-equipment I have now (M-Audio Keyboard, NanoKontrol, PadKontrol, Nocturn and FCB1010) and is all about looping both external input and sounds I collected. It uses multiple instances of Ableton Looper, a self-hacked Step-Sequencer for the PadKontrol and some instrument racks. One for key-sounds, the other for collected sounds.
I guess I will do some sort of video tutorial round-trip of the setup when time is right.
The most important thing, though: I finally found answers to all conceptual question and solutions to all technical problems. I now know, that I can spend my time again thinking about music, not about technology. And when I have enough pieces done, I can now easily perform them.
I don’t know exactly when that happened, but I recently discovered that Om Records has now also joined the Spotify-game. That, of course, means that LifeB is now also on there. Feels kind of nice.
Follow this link to get redirected to the track.
If anybody out there puts together a playlist, where my track sits in neatly (besides the original compilation), I’d love to hear it.
As some of you know, I’m still a student of what is called “Communication and Multimediadesign“. There you learn dealing with all different kinds of media, no matter if it’s print, web, film or audio. Unfortunately I never touched much audio during the studies. I had no room for it. But I gain more and more confidence, that there should be much more music and sound surrounding me in my everyday life.
After purchasing the lovely Tascam DR100 I found myself enjoying the very fundamentals of sound. I guess you could also tell that by listening to my recent work. Just running around, recording everything I can find, as long as it has some remarkable character.
All that collecting of sound-fragments has proven meaningful, as I now got myself working on a first sound design project: Making small animated Typo-Idents audible. They are meant to promote the fonts of a new typo-webshop called Hype For Type. Animated by bauwrk, this clip introduces their best-selling Neo Deco:
The best possibility to grasp the nature of this work is to watch it without sound. This is where i started. Then gradually made my way to that “spacey” feel. Find the match! Tell me what you think!
In Summer 2008 I first explored, how noises and random sounds can form to rhythm and go along with calm acoustic sounds. That concept took hold on me for some time. Now and then I did some small sketches, that would fall into that category. I had two of them already on Soundcloud, Cleansing and Ursulurn. Recently, I uploaded this early first piece (Morgenschillgit) and decided to make them all free to download. I won’t put work into these anymore and they won’t appear in future releases. So if you like them, go grab!
It’s been now already two weeks living off my daily routine trying to focus on music. It feels really great to just make yourself room for what you call your passion.
Nevertheless, it was of course (again) a bit naive to think, that after these 3 weeks there will be an EP to be released. Here I can let my activity circle full-time around music and sound, but I had to reconfigure myself first. Get myself on track again, after my head was dug into some other stuff for university (programming Flex/Actionscript for example).
Still, i get something done. Have ideas to follow, loose ends to connect and instruments to play. The feeling turned out to be right, that my basic musical nature is about playing “real instruments” with direct control over all aspects of musical expression. I’m falling in love with the piano more and more. It has such a beautiful and warm sound. Just hearing the sustain of a nice chord reminds me of home.
So beside my Ableton-activities I also wrote a little piano piece, which is not yet completely finished. I recorded it, all the tiny little hick-ups included. But in the end they really don’t matter, as the message lies somewhere else…
I assure you that all of my activities will definitely lead to an upcoming EP, but there is still a longer way to go for me. 3 weeks not enough (who would have thought). So stay tuned…
I’m happy to see my older work still appealing to people. Recently i was asked if my track “These Days” could be used for the graduation project of two german film-students: Christopher Holme and Frank Seleger.
They made a really good and professional Short Documentary on Kite-Surfing called “Synthese”. Paid a lot of attention on small little details, which I really appreciate in film. It is in German, but even just watching the footage and listening to the nice soundwork pays off. Enjoy!
It’s been a long time since anyone knowing me through my music got any updates about where I’m heading. This post wants to show what has happened since “Mixed Sessions” and what to expect from me in near future.
Back in the days, when I got my first own computer I started using it for making music. It was a tough learning process, digging through all the possibilities, the technological barriers and especially getting equipment together supporting me in this process. While still learning, there were (here and there) some tracks popping out. For me as a perfectionist they were not what I had in mind. When listening to them, I could hear what was wrong and why this special track did not represent what I thought I would actually be capable of doing. Nevertheless, as some kind of self-healing exercise I uploaded some of these tracks to Last.fm. Did not expect anything. Called the album “Mixed Sessions” as there was no connection whatsoever between the single tracks. I thought that this “album” could be regarded as gradually growing. When I finished a new track, that could just be added to the list. And nothing happened at first.
This changed, when CixxxJ stumbled across my music and recommended me to Pixieguts. For those who don’t know, Pixieguts is a vocalist from Australia who collaborates digitally with artists from all over the world. Doing this, she created a whole network around her art. Created a network of independent artists, who support and respect each other. I got to know her massive network, when she recommended me to all of her friends (or “followers” in today’s language).
And all of a sudden I woke up having people listening to my tunes. The tunes, that were not meant to be anything. That were just experimenting with the possibilities. Just searching for a home in this never-ending electronic landscape. Thank you really much, Pixie. I learned a lot from you.
That searching for a place is not over yet. (Probably it should never really be over) I should be delighted, that there are still people out there on Last.fm who regularly listen to my stuff. I am. But on the other hand these tracks really don’t represent “me”. There was a time I really digged Drum and Bass. You can clearly hear that when listening to These Days. But these days are over now. I guess finding a home in electronic landscape is finding what is really “you”. And when you found it: just do it. Explore your style and refine it.
What can I say – right now it is the first time, that I really have a very precise vague picture of the music I want to do. The elements. The sounds. The atmosphere. It is more acoustic and has more to do with real instruments and playing of real instruments. This is me: fell in love with the sound of electronic music, but want to make space for the real Nicken: Getting lost in playing piano / guitar / melodica / trumpet (soon?).
In a few days I will begin to take 3 weeks off my daily routine to just focus on music. The result will be some sort of EP. I am excited as ever to see that I’ll get the chance to really put all of my ideas into one baby. To really put tunes out, that yell: “Listen, this (!) is Nicken.” To stop searching and settle down in the new home that I just found.
