around the turn of the millennium Archie Patterson requested a “sequel” for a portrait about his outstanding distribution “Eurock” (Portland) of avantgarde, prog- and Krautrock…
Not Kraut really, but still pretty much valley humpf, I took the bait and did a short (video) clip about such “Mensch-Humpf” + the essay hereafter trying to explain, what’s the inner flame and all this passion about Nada Brahma.
(Archie had a good laugh and called it ‘free-source-grammar’…)
2015 at the carnaval of Basel
Free-source-grammar
We might have to go back quite a ways to find the reason for why the world seems upside down. Why doctors destroy health, why lawyers distort justice, why schools and universities destroy knowledge, why governments destroy freedom, why mass media destroy information, why religion destroys spirituality, etc., And… is there a similar equation for music vs. sound? Maybe we’d find reasons in the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi library or studying Echnaton vs. Jesus to explain some of these magic (…sic…) changes…
If this may not be the issue here, it still opens my biography backwards. I marvel about the steps of my life how all these experiences became the present and how this present viewpoint has triggered the past experiences. Some 17 catalogue numbers in one single handwriting… one love… and still just a little joyful noise…
After many musical journeys, it became obvious that it wasn’t the interest in music, but the Sound I was after. Always and Forever. As a child I already recorded (on the very first existing dictaphone, an Ultravox) bubbling mushed potatoes and then played it back on the old lady’s piano, just hitting one key and listen, muse, dream, letting the mind fly, not thinking…
There’s another seminal « encounter » when I was six years old : my old man brought home an LP of one André Pop „Delirium in Hi-Fi », thinking it was pure joke that one has to stick his head between two loudspeakers and listen to music in stereo! I was mesmerized ever since of those treatments Pop did to the trombone players on Boris Vian’s poetry: reversing the tape and have them learn the melody “upside down”, then record it (with the tape in place), reverse the tape again, record it and put it in place in the final mix! So you’d hear the melody “backwards” and perfectly recognize the strange (backwards) sound of trombones playing the “right thing”!!!
I remember when I played that to Lars Hollmer (sometime in the early seventies), we played many little sequences of his backwards, learnt it that way then jammed on it… Lasse even recorded some of his own tracks like that on later releases (one of them was on Sibirska Cyklar)…
In any case, I wanted to become a musician because I figured you could always play something (and hopefully make a living “out of it”). However, I very quickly found out, I’d be better off n o t becoming a musician after I studied music (but rather become a jester instead)… Hence, I quickly drifted away from teachers and/or idols of all sorts…
Eventually that triggered the first LP Kulu Hatha Mamnua, starting work with friend Dizzi (from Débile Menthol) in 1982. It was the can-opener for experimenting life through sound, the first album fuelled with mixed-pickle wackiness tainted with a lighter shade and tone. The second album Manoeuvres d’Automne reversed the poles in that for this sequel it was Dizzi who was ‘captain in charge’, his aura giving the LP a darker colour than Kulu…, better suited for the gigging live-unit at the time. Dizzi remains to this day my best and complementary sparring partner, although we lost track for more than 20 years. His spoonwork on the video Rasta Lumpi came like a rebirth of our friendship and mutual understanding.
I realized that sound alone was matter. Music is only a waste product of this initial trigger SOUND. Logos, the beginning of everything. What else was the big bang? How could He have said: let there be light if He hadn’t sound before? (He never told us where he got Sound from, the old charlatan…!)
Moreover and b.t.w.: if “in the beginning was the word (logos)” that implies that there must have been a time before the beginning. And that unbeknownst is what, exactely? sound and safe?
This extraordinary gift (sound) for man to have two dimensions in one (sound and rhythm like space and time) is THE vehicle we know as Music which enables us to reach and travel to the very depth of our inner self, like sexual enlightment (to re-initiate the intuition coming from Sound?). Music makes us real, makes us capable to communicate beyond words. Like a holy joker to keep us thought-free, ego-free, free-form, one…
But wee have morphed music to our superficial ego, pinned it into categories and – sadly enough – seeded it with myth, making it into an unholy grail, a sole revenue stream, creating an economic entity, like morality for sale, ethics on the stock market etc. Wee have created unique styles of music, molded dogmas with clergical exegeses and taste-police, mostly forgetting that we a r e Sound… we are mellow steady flow…
Our most sophisticated knowledge of each style of (jazz, classical, ragaspunz or rastakunz etc.) music is ridiculously small compared to that engulfilling omnipresent SOUND, the block of which each music’s only a tiny little unimportant tip, compared with Logos. And one professor dr. es Mozart thinks he can judge dr. es Punk? Maybe even kill in the name of the right note (R.I.P. John Lennon)? Destroy the Kennedy Center, the Walk of Fame and other holy shrines to affirm a new hegemony of schmock’n’troll?… Is hearing not meaning to understand?… Listening coming way before speaking?…
In most musics, today, we have guinness-book, Oscar-sitcoms and other piss-nobel-prizes for artists, but SOUND itself has no pantheon, no soundist to receive recognition for his “merits”. 16th century’s Johannes Keppler has signaled his ‘heavenly harmony’ (and his book is still hard to find). Only a century later Ernst Chladni signalled his flabbergasting discoveries. No school hardly ever mentions any of it. As little as further explorations by the likes of A. Lauterwasser (e.g. Epos Dei) and many others… as the paradigm of science says: there is a reality independently from the observer… More and more seekers/seeers reveal yet more issues related to “my vehicle”, yet it falls flat under the table because of mediadic disinterest which dares me questioning the stuff that we learn vs. all the stuff we’d better be told…
Hence, I’m not interested in just music. I love all musics. I studied some for a while, went further… kept changing styles… exploring… progress…move on… just being in resonance with sound (via music) is the only importance, really. Music as a means to an end is not an issue (no condition is permanent!) but if I don’t hear the sound I imagine I might as well create one I can hear… Needless to say I literally fled from all exclusive associations, heretic clubs, members only bands etc., or being caught each time a genre took my style (or was it the other way ‘round?…)…
The best stanza in all reviews was: “This album (The Return of Peeni Waali, 1995) should not exist. It is (commercially) impossible!” Most descriptions penned adjectives like versatile, wacky, uncategoriseable (impossible to market)…
Sure, I dwelled for 12 years in a reggae-composition-cycle. There was the Peeni Waali expenditure (1989 – 2001) where I found comfort in the minimalistic vehicle, giving me the opportunity to experiment with opulent orchestrations, expanding the roster of friends (Sha, 2006), fractal it to Persian inflections (Shab Tab, 2012), soaking up Sufism.
Finally, I returned to the very basic roots of the city where I was born (Basel) and even wrote a piccolo march (for the local carnaval). This recent discovery anchored my philosophy all the more in that the carnaval represented an unprecedented freedom of form: unlike the dreaded stage appearances, concerts with wet panties contests between guitarists and drummers, the foolishness of making 2,5 bucks per 36 hours non-stop, no sleep etc.. Marching in the streets playing piccolo, wearing a mask, being incognito, doing it for no mercantile purrpussy, but for sole hedonistic pleasure, revealed an extraordinary blessing. One gives his creations, one receives a smile of a spectator, one is active (playing) and passive (looking at the spectators), continually on the move. There is no competition, no gain at stake, no “reward”, no record release and press shoobidoo, but just fully being one by being present. Katharsis. Period.
Having received that gift of perception (our vehicle), we owe it to Wakantanka to being original and grateful for letting us drive His astral Aston Martin, for being an embassador of originality, some kind of James Bond with plenty astral bum-bummies to quentch this insatiable (vain) thirst for ‘more’, more kicks, more idols, more billionnaires to admire etc.
Looking back, I’m quite pleased that there are many original such attempts in my back-catalogue even if the joker often popped up his head and shouted name-dropper, copycat, iconoclasticus intellectualitor, etc… The originality sometimes resided in different approaches to joyful noise. I don’t mean necessarily playing oboe upside down or 10,000 ukulele-players naked in Hide Park, but e.g. making musical partners jump over their own shadows = another vocation dear to me: musical voyeurism…I like looking at it that way for the track with Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem Beacon of Hope.
The communication with/between all these people who passed through the mill of life also remains a great part of the aforementioned originality. E.g. as a side leg sometimes I do sessions or recordings for other people. For 30 years, I recorded ensembles for an ethnological label in Zürich, which brings ensembles from Mongolia, Uganda, Tuva and many other places who then record 2-3 albums in 3-4 days. Very archaic renditions of mostly old traditional stuff. Very enchanting, touching, genuine… original! Within such sessions I expose this endemic Swiss behavior: as a people, we developed from basically peasants, mercenaries and waylayers.
I am one of the gatekeepers of the waylayer tribe: all castles you see here along the Valley of the Rhein (the classical Alpine north-south route) were hot points from where men observed the caravans transporting goods from north to south and vice-versa. When a caravan seemed juicy enough, they’d ride down quick and tax a chunk for passing rights. Hence, I tax a chunk of every valuable ensemble in form of a little piece of sound, which then I’d include in a current project. This façon de faire enabled me to flavor productions with wild musk and leave a scent of “musical voyeurism”…
While canning music I encountered the myriad of excellence in each music, I noticed that diving into the fractals of each one, it makes me feel the archaic root (the sole authenticity in all musics, LOGOS!). That root seems to be a cold culture that doesn’t evolve. It’s still played as is and was 100’s, maybe 1000’s of years before! Whereas the evolutionary music, the development of hot culture makes it degenerate the way we know (more is less!). Reaching a point of extinction almost, becoming a non-interest, a global boredom, forgetting the root! As is, much of the conservable written word became eternal, stockable via print (look what journalism has become today!), a format like stocked music on LP became completely obsolete in only 50 years. Does this want to tell us that we are not meant to be the keepers of our intuition’s excellence?
I’m still convinced that, if we are not meant to be keepers, then we ought to focus on our strength as the seeers, the visioneers being given senses to materialize our intuitions for the sake of enlightenment, not as means to an end in a reward system, as an orgasm would be the reward of well-done fore-play…! I’m convinced that all lies are being revealed during these very present times. We already understand the importance of seezing the spur of this awakening consciousness and are about to gain full access to re-programming our matrix. Decode and park fear and all the rest of such. They cannot stop the Age of Aquarius. We are meant to remain the creators. They will surrender…Halleluja or something like that…