Donnerstag, 16. April 2015

abseits, mittelprächtig.


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."

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