re:start

for a restart of this neglected blog of mine
let's start where it all started
i still vividly remember being thirteen
playing a very simple computer game with red leds
but having disconnected the speaker
as this would enable me to play at night unbeknownst to my parents
and then discovering that lighting of the leds
intervered with the reception of the radio
while at the same discovering the pinnball sounds at the end
of the frequency spectrum of that radio
together with some harmonica (hohner navy band)
i created my first tape of noise
'over green seas by galahad kilner'
little did i know the world of noise out there
being weened on schlagers et al
so eventually i drifted of to metal mires and new wave
playing some bass trying to get some kind of band together
and pestering my mates with an endless stream of demotapes
(little did they know they only heard a tip of the iceberg
of music that i actually made)

so where it all started
was a book of interviews with john cage
'conversing with cage'
call it an epiphany
something opened in my mind
which to this day luckily hasn't closed
all of it 
the chance
the game play
the silence
the absence of silence
the choice
the humour
the seriousness without the dread
the all
i discovered a whole new world
which i am still exploring today
which is limitless
for which i am glad

i found free jazz
and
improv

somewhere in between i gave up writing lyrics
as i thought i had pretty much said what i had
to say and i didn't want to repeat myself
or say something somebody else had said better

later on i discovered 
amonst others
alvin lucier
toshiya tsunoda
andrea neumann
the onkyo movement
and more specifically taku sugimoto
whom i adore
i combined a lot of what was before
in my pieces as gart & seekatze

normally for practice i play some fingerpicking
john fahey-esque improvisation or play to some jazz record
but earlier this week i was playing
a -for lack of better term- reductionist piece
letting the silence evolve between each note
and letting the silence play the next one
in the attic
while my wife and daughter of four were playing
when i suddenly realized they had fallen silent
and where listening very intently to the silence,
the scarce notes

a fine moment

this is where i am now

and here is where we'll continue

or may2011 not

what have i done ? listened to some old stuff (even bruce springsteen's first 7 albums in a row nonetheless) found some things out and forgot some others things. keeping true to the core of me. will be posting soon more & more. because my head's exploding.

posthumus

frankly, i'm bewildered by the amount of the output some artists have once they're deceased. while the vulgarisation of recording equipment may not have brought immortality, it certainly makes the legends live on. (addition : prehumus : modern media capabilities haven't made it that if it isn't on film it doesn't exist, but that if it isn't on film, it becomes legend. granted, legend for the few, but haven't legends always been for the few, the storytellers, the sages while the rest of the tribes consumed and consumated and got consumed in the wake of myths ?)

absolutes

why wouldn't i like dead in june, blutharsh, boyd rice. they take their aesthetic to the limit without bothering with ethics. they don't cop out half way, saying oh yes we use the paraphernalia but that's just shock value, we don't mean it. it's up to you to find yourself and them, in this quagmire of postmodern referencing of fascist, neodarwinist symbolism (dij for instance, uses the occult distorted through the thule filter rather than going to the source material). it's showing me the retrograde darwinist that in my opinion is part of our core whether we like it or not. they are showing us our murky side, the part in us we like to ignore (unless we are right wing of course, in which case we revel in it).

anja plaschg

at first i thought all this pain in one young heart, but i remembered ; this was me at the same age with all the weight of the world on my shoulders (a smidgen less talented though, a big smidgen, a smudge). every song of soap&skin's lovetune for vacuum is filled with loss, decay and death; written between the ages of 14 and 18; this is a mary shelley, a diamanda galas in the making. make it past 30 anja and don't make it into an act, i beg you.

silense

i've always been interested in silence, probably because i tend to be silent myself. lots of people interpret social silence as either shyness, arrogance or depth. from personal experience, i'd say it can be either and it can be neither, in one and the same person. sometimes i just don't have anything interesting to say, sometimes i'm just not interested.
silence as an artform often gets caged into 4:33, which is sad, because this is not about silence, it is about pause. silence is not the negative of noise, silence is part of noise, silence is a lense through which you can hear the noise more clearly. the onkyo music of all the off-site offshoots is proof of this. silence is what keeps noise together, like the intramolecular forces that keep matter together.

the times and life off.

i guess i have always been a late bloomer. probably because my youth was uneventful and reasonably happy, so no need to rebel and no residual traumas. my rebellion started when most of my peers gave up theirs and the magnitude of it continues to grow even now. i've embraced subversiveness from day one, and fell in love with fringeculture of whatever kind. yet i've always felt on the fringe of fringe, an observer rather than a participant, even when i participated actively, i felt sociopathically aloof from the people around me. i'm pretty sure a lot of the people i met over the years in the core of fringe feel pretty much the same; out of place. today i decided to document past, present and future of my love for fringe in this blog. i'm unsure how long it will last or how many posts i will manage before finding the endeavour most futile and moving on, but until then, i will be here.
the title of this blog is the title of a magazine i stumbled upon once -most of my discoveries are stumble-upons, i discover peripherally rather than by design- called, yes you saw it already, fringecore. it is one of the most outstanding publications that i have seen and i treasure the few copies i have.