COLLABORATIONS (1994 - 1995)
This album - which I count as my sixth - is exactly what the title suggests:
a collection of various collaborations with different friends, who - with one exception - all happened to be guitar players.
In contrast to the majority of my albums, this one doesn't attempt to represent a "whole that's bigger of the sum of it's parts". Instead, it really is a collection of single pieces - or single sets of pieces per guest, at best - which have little in common stylistically. Instead, on these tracks I rather attempted to meet each of my collaborators halfway of where they were musically coming from, so to say - which was OK to me, since I just had begun to search for my own voice and style two or three years earlier...
Furthermore, most of these tracks were either spontaneous sessions, or work in progress in different stages of completion (...if not sheer youthful mayham!). In some cases (especially "Lime Tea Tree") I really wish a final, flawless version had manifested at some point...
For in spite of all of my shortcomings as a self-tought musical beginner - which unavoidably also curse these recordings and probably prevented my contributors to shine more (most of whom at that point were already much more accomplisht artists than our humble collabs do reveal) - in spite of all that, I still see a lot of appeal, fun and potential in these tracks. But maybe that's only me, nostalgically remembering old times. Anyway...
I'd like to briefly introduce the other boys:
Wolfgang Kornberger is an old schoolmate of mine; for some years, we used to be really close friends, until our lives finally led into different directions.
Already at 16, he was an astonishing, virtuoso guitar player and songwriter, I used to be a fan of his prog rock school band "A la DIN" and created the cover art for their first cassette release.
The two tracks with Wolfgang on this album are a version of a track I already had recorded in a different version ("Sheba's Dance, the title track of my third album) and a spontaeous session - both recorded on the same day at the little room in Heidelberg where I used to live during my professional training as an offset printer...
As far as I kept track of his activities, he was member of several more bands and projects (all of them prog or celtic music, and none of them very succesful, it seems), for some years he switched to acoustic guitar, in later years his musical activities were put on a backburner, in favour of writing and teaching.
One of many fond memories I have of him is on one of my birthday parties in the early 90s in Heidelberg, sitting in a corner in the kitchen with the cheap acoustic guitar of my roommate, and precisely doubling every note of the guitar solo of "Child in Time" (the Made in Japan version, which just was coming from the hifi) with nonchalant ease...
Uwe Linde - until recently - was one of my (two) employers at the printing company where I used to earn my living for some 22 years (the other one being his brother, Jürgen).
In addition to that, we used to be friends (in fact, he's even my marriage witness) and started recording music together in the early years (...although sadly, some more years down the road some tensions grew between us, and even though we managed to get these settled, our initial fiendship never completely recovered).
In any case, Uwe Linde is - and already was in the early 90s - a brilliant acoustic guitar player, composer and also a singer/songwriter who was into flamenco, (light) jazz and picking techniques - I can best describe him as a mixture between Siggi Schwab and Paco de Lucia.
You can check him out on his home page:
www.uwelinde.de/Musik01.html
Markus Pletz was another friend of mine, a fellow student when we studied graphical design at the University of Applied Science in Mainz. He also was (almost) a neighbour at the first appartment where I lived in that city, and we often payed each other visits in the evening, having a beer together and a chat, sometimes listening to and discussing (rock!) music, and occasionally - like in the recording on this album - we jammed together.
Unlike Wolfgang and Uwe, he was less of an virtuoso, and his focus wasn't so much on music (later, he would become a photoggrapher), but anyway he was guitar player of a band that played blues rock (mostly cover versions) and still a much better eductated musician than me at that point (or still...). He finished his studies much earlier than me, moving to Berlin afterwards, where I have lost sight of him...
Klaus Chmieleski is another friend from my student days, and fortunately one who I didn't lose contact with; in fact, he still is one of my closest friends, even if we only see each other much too rarely these days...
Although we actually collaborated on only very few occasions, I owe a lot to Klaus musically - for example, it was him who introduced me to the music and ideas of Brian Eno in the early 90s (of course, I - vaguely - knew who Eno was even before that, but didn't care much for him, until then...). It was a real ear- and eye-opener!
Klaus was an excellent musician - keyboarder, synthesist and singer - in his own right, however at the point we met had nearly stopped being involved in music (he used to be member of a locally succesful art pop band from the area of Koblenz, and also had recorded some exquisit ambient solo material). Later, around the turn of the millenium, he would give up on music completely in favour of type design and graphical art, but he would remain one of those friends I'd play my latest work-in-process to, and he always gave me his honest opinion and constructive advice (which usually helped me a lot to improve my efforts...).
Steffen Brückner (as You might guess from his name) actually is my younger brother; ten years younger in fact, so when these recordings took place, he was merely 15 years young and had only started to play guitar (but already had his owen death metal band going!).
Over the years, he was involved in a string of metal projects, most of them on the really hard, fast and - at least for my ears - extreme end of the spectrum. Some were quite succesful in the scene they were aimed at. A few years ago he took a step back from his musical activities (although he is still working on new projects sporadically) and since has started a second career as thriller / horror author and audio book producer.
Since many years we have plans to do a proper album together, but until now, it has not happend. The four tracks on this album should be taken with a grain of salt - we mostly just had a bit of good fun making some noise...
P.S. The cover art of this album is arguably the worst I ever did - sorry for that, folks! :-) It's the original one, though - and after all, the download of this one is for free...
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