music
has always been important for me. when I realized growing up and loosing interest
in toys playing guitar was still an option to play around. and it is still. making
art is fun and keeps my mind going, making a digital production is always a routine
on a known path but also moving into unknown areas. it is amazing what you discover,
something to be found in yourself to become an entity a group can benefit from…
on the other hand my view on music appears limited in comparison to kent
granyon, his view is way more open, while I´m focussed on a bunch of warp artists
pretending that this is the tip of the iceberg that reaches into the future. I
was able to be appalled during party conversation when someone did not know the
cool stuff or talked about his lame taste in music. I am much more open-minded
today realizing that I have been a fan of stupid stuff. and let us be honest:
the choice in music is very personal and is often linked to biography. maybe a
girl, a friend or a situation made you familiar with a certain track or a band
and then the fascination takes off.
I remember a girl playing nuno bettencourt´s
guitar solo in extremes´ ’hip today, saying ‘if you can do that, you´re good’
(I could not). the fascination for his phrasing, technique, speed, polyrhythm,
wit and sound was immediately there and never vanished again. I remember frequenting
a fan website on chris cunningham and michel gondry having a link to the boards
of canada website on their homepage. when I clicked it (after ignoring it for
months), the magic happened, I spend hours listening to their animation-escorted
loops.
back in the days of being a trainee teacher I went to a party of
my trainee girlfriend with lots of further trainees. I met a guy with mid-long
hair, tall and gawky with a unique way of talking to you making you wonder if
he is making fun of you or if he is supposed to be your best friend. we talked
about our fascination for autechre, explaining which album is the best and which
one would be a must have. he recommended four tet and prefuse 73 to me. actually
I got the four tet debut which is still one of my favourites and a great revenant
album. I turned down looking for prefuse 73 as I was not into hip hop and it was
a kind of a no-go for me at that time. how naïve to ignore where autechre came
from…
however, my fascination for nuno was deep and his playing and drafting
guitars made a deep impact on me. I had to get all the extreme albums, but even
more interesting was ‘schizophonic’, the solo debut and the funk rock power trio
mourning widows. I still love these albums, unfortunately they have never been
released in europe (or united states) so I had to import them from japan for 60
dm each. I am just writing this to show that I was okay with spending much money
on music, not only to get it but also to appreciate the work. there have been
further releases I could not order in any way. however, I had a guy in my orbit
who was downloading a lot in these newer days of the internet. I was never into
napster or sharing, or trading bad sounding mp3s that you would not listen to
again anyway. so as I was offered I asked him to look for stuff to find on nuno.
he came up with ‘population 1’, an album I could not buy in any case (post hmv,
pre ebay, amazon, bleep, etc) and another track with nuno in it, saying that is
was some kind of stupid hip hop.
a quick listen proved it, it was stupid hip
hop, five seconds of the middle of the track must have been enough to render a
judgement.
back in 2020 (so about 20 years later) my fascination for prefuse
73 exploded after rediscovering an album I had bought and mislaid in 2009. while
developing a greed for more and more abstract post-hip-hop tracks I discovered
the 2001 warp sampler ‘routine’ featuring the fantastic prefuse 73 track ‘nuno’.
I cannot be sure but it must have been this track I dismissed back in 2001.
in
retrospective I feel like an idiot, only seeking for what is already known. it
is like spitting out juice when you expect milk.
it is hard to find birthday
gifts for people of my age, but it is easy when they have a vinyl addiction. well,
it is hard to find the right record for people of my special interest, but it
is easy if you listen sometimes. however michi went to onkel stereo to get the
album by the only artist she had heard before apart from the warp icons. so I
got tycho´s ‘weather’ which is brilliant. but here is another idiot story: I put
on the record on 33 rpm even when the label and sleeve tell to play it on 45 rpm.
I read it and did not realize… the album sounded good anyway, we enjoyed the downbeat
sound agreeing that the down-pitched vocals are enough after a while. when I listened
to the mp3 version I realized that it was supposed to sound differently. while
typing these lines I am listening to the album on 45 rpm, realizing that the voice
I now a great female voice while all the tracks appear a little bit to fast. however,
this is a boards of canada sound turned into pop music. still great anyway. 
in
december I ordered kelly lee owens and kelly moran vinyls (the names are just
coincidence but it was a good opportunity to make my collection a bit more diverse
concerning gender) but my parcel has not arrived yet, forzunately the mp3s have.
so I thought about how to play music via the sound system without putting my smartphone
on it. so I just took an old smartphone (my old fairphone 1) and attached it to
the mixer. now I have kelly lee owens’ technoid sound in my living room, even
when I miss the white vinyl… I never thought I could spend music on digital formats,
but here it is. and it works pretty good. you can even play spotify on it, but
who wants that? 
during
the first lockdown in march 2020 I sat down and rendered tracks for a collection
having the working title ‘yellowcake’. in the time afterwards I have produced
so much more music that this album will probably not be released very soon as
I hope to have better stuff now. I have finished CRW2 and I am collecting and
writing for CRW3, I did a sample based album in the winter break and have another
album waiting for release. so I really hope that I can put out a concept album,
a post hip hop album and a post rock album this year, sometimes even escorted
by vinyl eps… cross your fingers, this might be huge!
recordoftides.com
‘revernant
euclids’ still sounds perfect in the car, it is so cold, huge and powerful in
a sound I never expected me to be able to do with a friend who is as nerdy as
me. we have even got our first (poetic) review which appeared as facebook comment
and is coped with permission:
‘finally,’ the machines would have said,
using such limited, deficient communication as speech, ‘finally this broken species
is gone, these irrational morons with their hallucinated interpretive sovereignty,
their obsessive search for meaning and the grubby-banal projection of muses is
pure mathematics! who needs creatures whose limited horizon of shallow needs is
always accompanied by need and excrement, by suffering and decay!’ this time i
didn't wake up. i merged with the god's graveyard and decomposed. god is dead.
markus verhülsdonk a.k.a. on ‘revenant euclids’
recordoftides.bandcamp.com/album/revenant-euclids
recordoftides.bandcamp.com
recordoftides.com
primal-scapes.de
update
2021-01-16: like every artist or musician I believe to not get enough attention.
everyone knows that success is not liked to quality but it never feels good when
the public simply doe not notice you. however, when the recent autechre remix
of a sophie track was shared the feedback was pretty divided. I am usually among
the sceptical ones these days and I took the obvious chance to post a link to
‘revenant euclids’. I feel bad for using every opportunity and the discussion
on a different topic to advertise my issue. the bad thing about it is its efficiency.
above you see the graph that bandcamp delivers: you can tell the interest on the
day of release (january 1) and the second increase after my post among the comments.
it is true, there is not bad publicity but I do not want to play the game this
way. I just needed a proof that I can. 
update
2021-01-16: yet another story from the past: in january 2016 I used to listen
to wdr cosmo playing a lot of world music which is actually not my type of thing.
however, I remember driving through the grey day in mülheim while this track came
up on the radio. I had no idea what mura masa was but I was immediately struck
by this track. fortunately my car radio delivers the artist and title in screen
so I could take a picture (see above) to do some research at home. unfortunately
the tracks have only been available digitally or on vinyl which were no options
for me these days. however, mura masa was supposed to be hauled up to the mainstream,
his debut album was supposed to feature damon albarn and a$ap rocky who did a
makeover of ‘lovesick’ (which is originally called ‘lovesick fuck’). the advanced
praise must have been too big, every track got a feature, it was supposed to be
huge. When the album finally came out my interest was gone, and I guess it was
a flop. I even think it is suspicious to put all feature guest onto the cover,
was mura masa not enough? now, being into vinyl, I got the ‘someday somewhere’
vinyl ep featuring the original ‘lovesick fuck’ track. what can I say: this piece
is perfect as it is supposed to be, offing different styles even on the shot run,
great sound, writing and production on point. who came up with the idea to pimp
it with big names? maybe it is not suppose to belong to mainstream. from the artists
point of view, this is the best that can happen to you! 
sven
piayda | aftermath
KURZstummfilmfestival
zeche carl, essen / youtube,
worldwide
2020-09-26, 3pm at zeche carl
2020-09-25 on youtube
kurz-stumm-filmfestival.de
'aftermath'
on youtube
youtube.com
facebook.de/kurzstummfilmfestival
facebook
event
sven piayda
NEEDLE IN THE MULTIVERSE
kunstwerden e.v., essen
2020-11-08 – 2020-12-11
opening 2020-11-08, 4 pm
postponed
opening
hours sun 3 – 6 pm
fri 8 – 11 pm
ruhrtalstr. 19 in den werdener toren
– tor 2
45239 essen
kunstwerden.de
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