My dear friend Max Bogner aka. Margaret Unkown has taken upon himself the work of recollecting all the old recordings of our very early band "abseits, mittelprächtig." which for both of us has been a very vital part of our becoming ourselves. I have written a little text about it and you can find and listen to everything on his beautiful homepage: http://www.margaretunknown.com/new-page/
"abseits, mittelprächtig. has been a
very early "lab" for experiments in performative, musical, digital and
dadaist expression which has taught me a lot and which's results became a
sort of base for my further artistic approach. Margaret and me were in
our teens when we discovered the surrealist manifesto by André Breton
and experimental (noise) composition such as Henri Chopin, Luigi
Russolo and Kurt Schwitters. To us this presented a whole new universe
and a liberating means of rebellion against the rigid "bourgeoise"
structures of the society we grew up in. Enthusiastic about the idea of
finding a surrealist music far off the shores of traditional,
rational harmonics, we have experimented with many instruments, objects
and recording devices. Identifying classical harmonics or structure as
the Rationalism the Surrealists were fighting almost a century ago, we
looked for a sound that is more true and more direct to what we tried to
discover as being us maybe a bit like Schopenhauer's Wille, without
the distorting and alienating qualities of the "filter" Vorstellung, if a
philosophical analogy is permitted. We never gave a concert in the
traditional way and I doubt that the music we produced will find many
listeners in the future. All of this doesn't matter, because for us this
band project was a crucial vehicle in finding our artistic expression
aside from anything you can learn at academia it was connected to
finding ourselves in our last teenyears and thereby one essential nexus
of this artworks were our personas. We have experimented with sound
art, implementing voices from the internet, neighbors and old tapes into
our pieces to swallow (i.e. "reflect on") the context our music was
created in. We have experimented with selfpresentation in the time of
the internet, creating us a fake biography (mostly copied from the
Beatleswikipedia) and inviting weird outsider artist (Neonazis and the
like) we found in the unutterable widths of the internet to collaborate
with the "great abseits, mittelprächtig." In doing so, we were playing
very early and naively with what it means to build a name and what is
authenticity when so much can be done via digital alter egos like
facebook, last.fm or myspace. In a similar vein we have done a fake
Indie music performance at Marco Enedi's Free Impro Open Stage in
Celeste Vienna or played improsessions on the streets of Vienna,
begging for money. In roaming through the widths of the world, we also
came to discover the atrocities of our world and felt the need to
display them. This is how the record "Teen crying after pervert neighbor fucked her"
found its name, which is the title of a porno movie, we found in a
session, where I decided to only make music with sounds I find on the
internet. Shocked by a title like that (who the hell would like to see
that?), we decided to take this title, to reveal how dirty the world
sometimes is. abseits, mittelprächtig. has never reached any recognition
whatsoever, nor did it intend to do so. But if we talk about it with
the few couple of friends who new it, it still feels like a legendary
as well as defining underground band we've had, because so much of what
we discovered there has become defining for our future world."
