An Ep with older songs that were previously unreleased. they are not that old. some are old some not. but even the old ones are not really old. and besides they are good. One of the songs is named "echt neu". This is not true I think. This song is a liar.
despite the great love we have for this song there never was a proper recording made, so this document is the only remaining, Ramin Ton label members TEAM17 & DJANGO GONZALEZ performing at Beautyfest Festival '07 in Kabelvaag, Norway, a song known as "Vampire state" aka "Brother song". After midnights of light and livingrooms that made our breath show. Let a dog rest on your lap and watch
Last Saturday Larry Floyd died of a very rare disease that disfuncts the urethra and kills you very slowly. The end is usually that the muscles (as you know the heart is also a muscle) soaked up so much of your pee that they just disfunct as well. So it happened to Larry Floyd. We are all very sad, but we know his legacy will keep on living. We would like to present you the last song ever recorded by Larry Floyd. Paper Boy. He wrote and recorded it in a time when he already knew about his deadly disease and his muscles soaked up so much already that he was only able to sing the song, while the instruments had to be played by friends and family. The disease is heard all the way through the song. But nonetheless the song is a great statement of man that tells us never to give up and that life only finds and end if we begin to forget.
These recordings are of a unique kind. The time, the places - they are just called Tipera. They arrived a place the world has long forgotten. And they forgot that there was a world behind them. The Tipera is lost.
Museum Ludwig will be presenting the first solo exhibition in Germany by the film maker, poet and film critic Jonas Mekas (*1922 in Lithuania). After an odyssey lasting almost five years as a forced labourer in Germany, and as a displaced person after the war, Jonas Mekas arrived in 1949 in New York. Here he dedicated himself in a whole host of ways to film, not least as an event manager who opened up an increasing number of possibilities for screening the New American Cinema - before the Anthology Film Archive, which he co-founded, could at last provide a home for the avant-garde film – from Sergei Eisenstein to Carl Theodor Dreyer – as well as for the underground film and other currents from 1970 on.
The exhibition sets out to convey the broad effect Jonas Mekas has had, his passion for film, and his enduring influence on artists and film makers of different generations, and with that on the whole history of film. Using documents, publications, film programmes and posters, and films shown on monitors, the exhibition will present the complex output of this artist, curator, writer, editor, critic and co-founder of the Anthology Film Archive. An extensive film programme will include not only a representative selection from his own filmography, but also films that became known through Mekas’ personal involvement and commitment. The screen in the cinema at Museum Ludwig will thus become a part of the exhibition area on equal footing with the gallery spaces.
Go to the exhibition if you can. They will be showing his films all month. And while you are there go upstairs to see the other exhibition about the San Francisco Art and Rock scene from the 60s. They have got all the posters you have seen so many times on the web. I can tell you they are even cooler live. By the way: while I was there I noticed the the Quicksilver Messenger Service must have been something like magicians. They are on every single poster. They seemed to have played every festival in San Francisco.
It seems almost incredible that Ursula Bogner’s musical talents should have remained undiscovered until now. Yet in view of her biography, this might have been just as inevitable. It was on a flight to Vilnius that I met Sebastian Bogner, Ursula’s son, who told me he was on a business trip for a pharmaceutical company. The usual small talk soon led to the topic of his mother Ursula, who also ‘liked to play around with synthesizers’, albeit purely on an amateur level and in a dedicated music room fitted especially for this purpose in the parental home. Among her acquaintances, it was simply considered one of her many eccentric hobbies and not paid a great deal of interest. At a cursory glance, Ursula Bogner’s life seemed simple and bourgeois to the core: a pharmacist, wife and mother, firmly ensconced in a detached house. A setup that made her obsession with electronic music all the more bizarre, an obsession that drove her to build her own studio for extensive recording and experimentation. According to the usual chronological benchmarks, Ursula Bogner’s biography appears short and conventional: Born (*1946) and raised in Dortmund, she moved to Berlin at 19 to study pharmacy. Degree in hand, she immediately went to work for pharmaceutical giant Schering, followed by marriage, children and a successful yet by no means sensational scientific career within the multinational heavyweight. At the same time, she developed a keen interest in electronic music. Throughout her early twenties, she followed the activities of Cologne-based ‘Studio für elektronische Musik’, attended seminars by Studio founder Herbert Eimert, exhibited great enthusiasm for Musique Concrète and, later on, shared her children’s enthusiasm for British New Wave Pop. Nevertheless, Ursula Bogner never involved herself in any scene, never made her music public. Maybe this can be attributed to her boundless curiosity. Besides composition, she also tried her hand at painting, printing (the booklet features reproductions of two of her linocuts) and developed a strong fascination for Wilhelm Reich’s ‘orgonomy’, the sexual researcher and psychoanalyst’s bizarre late work on his discovery of ‘orgonenergy’. Reich aimed to focus resp. collect this particular type of solar energy and use it for healing purposes. To this end, he created an apparatus, a cabin of wood and metal otherwise known as an ‘orgon accumulator’ (see image). Inspired by several trips to ‘Orgonon’ (Maine, USA) – Wilhelm Reich’s former workspace and home - Ursula Bogner decided to construct her own accumulator and stored it in the family’s backyard. At this point, it becomes increasingly hard to shake the suspicion, later confirmed by Sebastian Bogner, that his mother was drawn to all things esoteric. Mounds of New Age literature and fringe science works would litter the Bogner household. And yet, throughout all this, she remained a Schering employee and thus firmly rooted in the sciences. Her compositions, too, betray few signs of esotericism, in fact they are closer to studies and sketches: humorous and - in view of her biography - almost silly rather than tied to any particular school of mysticism or science. Nevertheless, it is remarkably hard to grasp or classify her work as a whole. Over the course of 20 years, she dabbled in many different styles leading to a huge wealth of work and a bewildering variety of titles.
Ursula Bogner, 1966 / Orgonakkumulator (by courtesy of Orgoninstitut, Dr. Trettin, Berlin) In the late 1960s, Ursula Bogner started to record her own music on reel-to-reel tapes. With some of these titles, we only found individual tracks of pieces recorded on a four-track-recorder – in these cases, I had to recombine the separate tracks to recreate the original piece. Unfortunately, I could not involve Ursula Bogner in the mixing process as she passed away in 1994. Invoking the original’s authenticity might seem insensitive, yet there was no other way to release them in their entirety. Ultimately, only three of the tracks featured on this CD/LP are such ‘reworkings’. All other titles were taken straight from the original reels. Covering a fairly short period of her creative career, they also convey a peculiar coherence in both form and content. A coherence that reflects her accessible, rhythmic and sometimes even ‘poppy’ side. Naturally, my own preference played a part in the selection process. All my personal favourites made it on the CD/LP, and whenever I listen to this collection, I invariably succumb to the titles’ light-hearted nonchalance. This might leave many hours of undiscovered gems, but a further compilation is already in the works. My thanks go out to the Bogner family, especially Sebastian Bogner, who was generous enough to grant me access to the reels and supply me with invaluable insights into his mother’s life. I hope that listeners will enjoy the same exhilaration I experienced on discovery of Ursula Bogner’s music. All 15 songs from the release can be listened to on the Faitiche Website.
