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Postcard #3 - Cologne - Songs for the Breathless
2012
In the last few years I have travelled more than ever before in my life. Physically, in terms of seeing foreign countries, walking through wastelands, kissing new friends goodbye in distant airports, as well as mentally, just gathering new experiences and insights.. And sometimes I managed to record those journeys, let some of those moments curdle into sound and song. Those acoustic artefacts of different points in time and space now lie on my desk like postcards that I bought and lettered yet never sent.
Now if I were to travel back in time to those points that were signficant, where would I end up? What's written on those postcards that I'd find now that I forgot about?
I'm not quite sure, but either way it's time to go and send them, one by one, until we have a collection that traces the steps on this journey.
The trip starts on an island in the Baltic, summer 2010, will continue to spring in Turkey, move back home from there.. and end in Berlin as we move from past to present tense. It will contain songs about apocalypse played on water bottles and resonating flintstones, the very first attempts to play a piano, explorations of vocal music, discoveries of new instruments, songs about yearning for departure and songs about return.
You will see, as each month from now until the end of the year, you will receive a bunch of mixed and mastered memories from me.
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Cologne. A room.
Over time I collected quite a bunch of
instruments. There are strings to be
plucked and wooden sticks to blow air
into, things to be hit and things to be
shaken, millions of ways to set some kind
of material into motion, to make another
resonate with sound. If people ask me
which was the first one I picked up, I tell
them it was the recorder. But actually, if
I want to be precise, there was another
one before.
In fact, the first cords I ever made vibrate
were right in my throat, the first body I
made resonate my own. Before I could
even think of ways to hold or play another
instrument, I had already discovered I
was equipped with one: a voice.
It still took a long time to get to know
it and befriend with it. You have to go
through the unsettling, dissociating
experience of hearing your recorded
voice for the first time, and believe me,
you won‘t like it. You have to face its
flaws and maybe learn to use turn them
into benefits.
Finally, at a time when my guitar would
feel wrong in my hands and the strings of
my banjo were only alienating, I sat down
in a corner of my bed, stripped of all
musical protheses, and decided to finally
attempt to make as much use of my one
very own instrument as possible.
This is the result of that experiment.
Cologne 2010 - Berlin 2012
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