(12938,1,'2015-09-10 09:43:49','2015-09-10 01:43:49','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\n<h1>AWMA</h1>\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Antonymes_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"222\" height=\"222\" /></a>AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins. The band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed. This melodically charged music exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\n\n<strong><a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/awmaband\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>      </strong>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\n<h3>Discography</h3>\n<div></div>\n<div> AWMA\'s self-titled debut EP will see release on the 14th of October 2015.</div>\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\n<h3>Biography</h3>\nAWMA (A Woman My Age) is a new trio made up of ex-members of the San Francisco-based band Half Film: Conor Devlin (vocals, guitar), Eimer Devlin (bass) and Jason Lakis (drums). Half Film recorded and toured from 1998 to 2001, before splitting off into [the] caseworker (Conor and Eimer) and The Red Thread/Mist and Mast (Jason) from 2003 to 2013. AWMA was conceived in 2014 and recording took place in early 2015. This EP represents the first recordings of the trio, who are an active band again after 15 years. A short European tour to support the EP will take place in October 2015, with an album to follow in spring 2016. Jason and Eimer continue to live in the Bay Area, while Conor lives in Switzerland.\n\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\n<h3>News</h3>\n[catlist name=awma-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\n[catlist name=awma-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\n\nNo reviews yet, sorry.\n\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\n<a title=\"AWMA EP Press Release\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/publicity/AWMA/AWMA-AWMA-Press_Release.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">AWMA s/t EP Press Release</a>\n\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\n&nbsp;\n\n[gallery ids=\"12932\"]\n\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\nNo music videos yet, sorry.\n\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\nAWMA\'s music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\n\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','AWMA','','inherit','closed','closed','','12836-autosave-v1','','','2015-09-10 09:43:49','2015-09-10 01:43:49','',12836,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12836-autosave-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12952,1,'2015-09-11 00:09:00','2015-09-10 16:09:00','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>AWMA</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"222\" height=\"222\" />AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins. The band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed. This melodically charged music exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n<strong><a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/awmaband\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>      </strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<div> AWMA\'s self-titled debut EP will see release on the 14th of October 2015.</div>\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nAWMA (A Woman My Age) is a new trio made up of ex-members of the San Francisco-based band Half Film: Conor Devlin (vocals, guitar), Eimer Devlin (bass) and Jason Lakis (drums). Half Film recorded and toured from 1998 to 2001, before splitting off into [the] caseworker (Conor and Eimer) and The Red Thread/Mist and Mast (Jason) from 2003 to 2013. AWMA was conceived in 2014 and recording took place in early 2015. This EP represents the first recordings of the trio, who are an active band again after 15 years. A short European tour to support the EP will take place early 2016, with an album to follow later in the year. Jason and Eimer continue to live in the Bay Area, while Conor lives in Switzerland.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=awma-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=awma-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\r\n\r\nNo reviews yet, sorry.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\n<a title=\"AWMA EP Press Release\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/publicity/AWMA/AWMA-AWMA-Press_Release.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">AWMA s/t EP Press Release</a>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"12932\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\nNo music videos yet, sorry.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nAWMA\'s music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','AWMA','','inherit','closed','closed','','12836-revision-v1','','','2015-09-11 00:09:00','2015-09-10 16:09:00','',12836,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12836-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12939,1,'2015-09-10 09:44:01','2015-09-10 01:44:01','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>AWMA</h1>\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Antonymes_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"222\" height=\"222\" /></a>AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins. The band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed. This melodically charged music exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n<strong><a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/awmaband\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>      </strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<div> AWMA\'s self-titled debut EP will see release on the 14th of October 2015.</div>\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nAWMA (A Woman My Age) is a new trio made up of ex-members of the San Francisco-based band Half Film: Conor Devlin (vocals, guitar), Eimer Devlin (bass) and Jason Lakis (drums). Half Film recorded and toured from 1998 to 2001, before splitting off into [the] caseworker (Conor and Eimer) and The Red Thread/Mist and Mast (Jason) from 2003 to 2013. AWMA was conceived in 2014 and recording took place in early 2015. This EP represents the first recordings of the trio, who are an active band again after 15 years. A short European tour to support the EP will take place in October 2015, with an album to follow in spring 2016. Jason and Eimer continue to live in the Bay Area, while Conor lives in Switzerland.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=awma-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=awma-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\r\n\r\nNo reviews yet, sorry.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\n<a title=\"AWMA EP Press Release\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/publicity/AWMA/AWMA-AWMA-Press_Release.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">AWMA s/t EP Press Release</a>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"12932\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\nNo music videos yet, sorry.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nAWMA\'s music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','AWMA','','inherit','closed','closed','','12836-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 09:44:01','2015-09-10 01:44:01','',12836,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12836-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12940,1,'2015-09-10 16:39:32','2015-09-10 08:39:32','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"157\" height=\"157\" /></a>From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA </a>- Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.\r\n\r\nCheck out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.','AWMA - Debut EP Announcement','','publish','closed','closed','','awma-debut-ep-anouncement','','','2016-02-03 13:50:13','2016-02-03 05:50:13','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=12940',0,'post','',0),(12941,1,'2015-09-10 10:13:30','2015-09-10 02:13:30','From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes AWMA - Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.\r\n\r\nCheck out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.','','','inherit','closed','closed','','12940-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 10:13:30','2015-09-10 02:13:30','',12940,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12940-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12942,1,'2015-09-10 10:14:59','2015-09-10 02:14:59','From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes AWMA - Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.\r\n\r\nCheck out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.','AWMA - Debut EP Anouncement','','inherit','closed','closed','','12940-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 10:14:59','2015-09-10 02:14:59','',12940,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12940-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12943,1,'2015-09-10 10:15:52','2015-09-10 02:15:52','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"145\" height=\"145\" /></a>From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes AWMA - Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.\r\n\r\nCheck out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.','AWMA - Debut EP Anouncement','','inherit','closed','closed','','12940-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 10:15:52','2015-09-10 02:15:52','',12940,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12940-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12944,1,'2015-09-10 10:17:29','2015-09-10 02:17:29','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"157\" height=\"157\" /></a>From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes AWMA - Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.\r\n\r\nCheck out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.','AWMA - Debut EP Anouncement','','inherit','closed','closed','','12940-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 10:17:29','2015-09-10 02:17:29','',12940,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12940-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12945,1,'2015-09-10 10:36:47','2015-09-10 02:36:47',' ','','','publish','closed','closed','','12945','','','2017-03-16 12:02:56','2017-03-16 04:02:56','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=12945',6,'nav_menu_item','',0),(12946,1,'2015-09-16 21:27:14','2015-09-16 13:27:14','<h4 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></h4>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, <a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\">Markus Mehr</a> isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','publish','closed','closed','','sonic-transmutation-an-interview-with-markus-mehr','','','2016-02-03 15:51:49','2016-02-03 07:51:49','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=12946',0,'post','',0),(12947,1,'2015-09-10 13:18:48','2015-09-10 05:18:48','<strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nAs one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nMM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong>\r\n\r\n<strong> </strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 13:18:48','2015-09-10 05:18:48','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12948,1,'2015-09-10 16:39:22','2015-09-10 08:39:22','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>AWMA</h1>\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Antonymes_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"222\" height=\"222\" /></a>AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins. The band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed. This melodically charged music exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n<strong><a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/awmaband\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>      </strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<div> AWMA\'s self-titled debut EP will see release on the 14th of October 2015.</div>\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nAWMA (A Woman My Age) is a new trio made up of ex-members of the San Francisco-based band Half Film: Conor Devlin (vocals, guitar), Eimer Devlin (bass) and Jason Lakis (drums). Half Film recorded and toured from 1998 to 2001, before splitting off into [the] caseworker (Conor and Eimer) and The Red Thread/Mist and Mast (Jason) from 2003 to 2013. AWMA was conceived in 2014 and recording took place in early 2015. This EP represents the first recordings of the trio, who are an active band again after 15 years. A short European tour to support the EP will take place early 2016, with an album to follow later in the year. Jason and Eimer continue to live in the Bay Area, while Conor lives in Switzerland.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=awma-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=awma-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\r\n\r\nNo reviews yet, sorry.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\n<a title=\"AWMA EP Press Release\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/publicity/AWMA/AWMA-AWMA-Press_Release.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">AWMA s/t EP Press Release</a>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"12932\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\nNo music videos yet, sorry.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nAWMA\'s music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','AWMA','','inherit','closed','closed','','12836-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 16:39:22','2015-09-10 08:39:22','',12836,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12836-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12949,1,'2015-09-10 16:39:32','2015-09-10 08:39:32','<p><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"157\" height=\"157\" /></a>From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes AWMA - Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.</p>\r\n<p>Check out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.</p>\r\n','AWMA - Debut EP Anouncement','','inherit','closed','closed','','12940-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 16:39:32','2015-09-10 08:39:32','',12940,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12940-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12950,1,'2015-09-10 17:05:14','2015-09-10 09:05:14','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"157\" height=\"157\" /></a>From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA </a>- Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.\r\n\r\nCheck out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.','AWMA - Debut EP Anouncement','','inherit','closed','closed','','12940-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 17:05:14','2015-09-10 09:05:14','',12940,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12940-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12951,1,'2015-09-10 17:10:23','2015-09-10 09:10:23','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"157\" height=\"157\" /></a>From the ashes of <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a> (no we didn\'t burn them) and via <a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>, Red Thread and Mist and Mast comes <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA </a>- Conor Devlin (vocals, guitars), Eimer Devlin (vocals, bass), and Jason Lakis (vocals, drums, guitars). We\'re excited to announce the release of their self-titled debut EP which drops October 14 preceded by the single \'Broadcast History\' out September 17.\r\n\r\nCheck out their <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">artist profile</a> for more info and be sure to check out the gorgeous \'Broadcast History\' next week.','AWMA - Debut EP Announcement','','inherit','closed','closed','','12940-revision-v1','','','2015-09-10 17:10:23','2015-09-10 09:10:23','',12940,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12940-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13332,1,'2016-01-21 14:00:03','2016-01-21 06:00:03','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>Battlestations</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft wp-image-11765\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Battlestations-300x297.jpg\" alt=\"Battlestations\" width=\"269\" height=\"266\" /><em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> –<strong> Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\nBattlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/Battlestations.music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>    <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/battlestations-music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8764 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SoundCloud.png\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Website\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8767 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Website.png\" alt=\"Website\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<div></div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Extent of Damage</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166622495%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-tiXsd&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nOctober 2015\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <em>The Extent of Damage</em> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Death Of The Day</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166806331%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-sPBhX&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nAugust 2013\r\n\r\nMelding elements of post-rock, ambient, industrial and prog, <i>The Death Of The Day</i> further refines Battlestations’ incredibly atmospheric and affecting musical output. The often dramatic shifts in mood are deftly handled, wielding enviable emotional weight.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>In a Cold Embrace</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166816791%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-FvIqz&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nApril 2012\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations’ second full-length is a masterfully crafted tableau, its scale and flow only fully apparent when the last note has faded. <i>In A Cold Embrace</i> is narratively rich music, realising the potential of the album format in a way that so much music misses. This is film as sound.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Return / Mr. Abject</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/233877687%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-xHbvI&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nDecember 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nThis 11-minute opus is an exercise in urgency and restraint. Layers of guitars slowly thicken over an insistent beat as an atmosphere of paranoia takes over. As with every Battlestations song \'Return / Mr. Abject\' has striking narrative detours that add another level of depth to the listening experience.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Battlestations</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/167196278%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-mFshC&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nJune 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations\' self-titled debut album is such a wonderfully sprawling and complex piece of work that distinguishing individual songs within the whole soon becomes meaningless. Comprising three tracks, two of which are over 18 minutes long, <i>Battlestations</i> presents a shifting instrumental narrative that effortlessly moves between dystopia and hope.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nLittle is known about Battlestations other than the basic facts: formed in Brussels, Belgium in 2009; released two albums (<em>Battlestations</em> and <em>In A Cold Embrace</em>) and two EPs (<em>Return/Mr. Abject</em> and <em>The Death Of The Day</em>); collaboration with Joe Dorsey on the Involved project. However, this shroud of anonymity feels fitting when listening to their enigmatic music. It often feels too big to attach to singular identities, and the atmosphere and mystique surrounding the songs suspends them, weightless, into a listening space unmoored from conventional reference points.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\nNo press releases yet, sorry!\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"11765\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\nNo music videos, sorry!\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nBattlestations music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','Battlestations','','inherit','closed','closed','','11763-revision-v1','','','2016-01-21 14:00:03','2016-01-21 06:00:03','',11763,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/11763-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13137,1,'2015-11-20 12:14:03','2015-11-20 04:14:03','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>Battlestations</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft wp-image-11765\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Battlestations-300x297.jpg\" alt=\"Battlestations\" width=\"269\" height=\"266\" /><em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> –<strong> Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\nBattlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/Battlestations.music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>    <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/battlestations-music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8764 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SoundCloud.png\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Website\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8767 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Website.png\" alt=\"Website\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<div></div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Extent of Damage</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166622495%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-tiXsd&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nOctober 2015\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <em>The Extent of Damage</em> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Death Of The Day</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166806331%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-sPBhX&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nAugust 2013\r\n\r\nMelding elements of post-rock, ambient, industrial and prog, <i>The Death Of The Day</i> further refines Battlestations’ incredibly atmospheric and affecting musical output. The often dramatic shifts in mood are deftly handled, wielding enviable emotional weight.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>In a Cold Embrace</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166816791%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-FvIqz&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nApril 2012\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations’ second full-length is a masterfully crafted tableau, its scale and flow only fully apparent when the last note has faded. <i>In A Cold Embrace</i> is narratively rich music, realising the potential of the album format in a way that so much music misses. This is film as sound.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Return / Mr. Abject</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/233877687%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-xHbvI&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nDecember 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nThis 11-minute opus is an exercise in urgency and restraint. Layers of guitars slowly thicken over an insistent beat as an atmosphere of paranoia takes over. As with every Battlestations song \'Return / Mr. Abject\' has striking narrative detours that add another level of depth to the listening experience.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Battlestations</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 241px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=761205938/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/battlestations\">Battlestations by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nJune 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations\' self-titled debut album is such a wonderfully sprawling and complex piece of work that distinguishing individual songs within the whole soon becomes meaningless. Comprising three tracks, two of which are over 18 minutes long, <i>Battlestations</i> presents a shifting instrumental narrative that effortlessly moves between dystopia and hope.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nLittle is known about Battlestations other than the basic facts: formed in Brussels, Belgium in 2009; released two albums (<em>Battlestations</em> and <em>In A Cold Embrace</em>) and two EPs (<em>Return/Mr. Abject</em> and <em>The Death Of The Day</em>); collaboration with Joe Dorsey on the Involved project. However, this shroud of anonymity feels fitting when listening to their enigmatic music. It often feels too big to attach to singular identities, and the atmosphere and mystique surrounding the songs suspends them, weightless, into a listening space unmoored from conventional reference points.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\nNo press releases yet, sorry!\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"11765\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LV1WIKvccJo?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/OKSue6CIp1A?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/HwFVigOuV3w?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/w6IyEce5NqE?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nBattlestations music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','Battlestations','','inherit','closed','closed','','11763-revision-v1','','','2015-11-20 12:14:03','2015-11-20 04:14:03','',11763,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/11763-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13134,1,'2015-11-19 11:24:35','2015-11-19 03:24:35','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>Battlestations</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft wp-image-11765\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Battlestations-300x297.jpg\" alt=\"Battlestations\" width=\"269\" height=\"266\" /><em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> –<strong> Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\nBattlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/Battlestations.music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>    <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/battlestations-music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8764 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SoundCloud.png\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Website\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8767 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Website.png\" alt=\"Website\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<div></div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Extent of Damage</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166622495%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-tiXsd&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nOctober 2015\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <em>The Extent of Damage</em> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Death Of The Day</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166806331%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-sPBhX&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nAugust 2013\r\n\r\nMelding elements of post-rock, ambient, industrial and prog, <i>The Death Of The Day</i> further refines Battlestations’ incredibly atmospheric and affecting musical output. The often dramatic shifts in mood are deftly handled, wielding enviable emotional weight.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>In a Cold Embrace</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/166816791%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-FvIqz&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=false&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\nApril 2012\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations’ second full-length is a masterfully crafted tableau, its scale and flow only fully apparent when the last note has faded. <i>In A Cold Embrace</i> is narratively rich music, realising the potential of the album format in a way that so much music misses. This is film as sound.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Return / Mr. Abject</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 120px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/track=1950736445/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/track/return-mr-abject\">Return / Mr. Abject by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nDecember 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nThis 11-minute opus is an exercise in urgency and restraint. Layers of guitars slowly thicken over an insistent beat as an atmosphere of paranoia takes over. As with every Battlestations song \'Return / Mr. Abject\' has striking narrative detours that add another level of depth to the listening experience.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Battlestations</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 241px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=761205938/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/battlestations\">Battlestations by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nJune 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations\' self-titled debut album is such a wonderfully sprawling and complex piece of work that distinguishing individual songs within the whole soon becomes meaningless. Comprising three tracks, two of which are over 18 minutes long, <i>Battlestations</i> presents a shifting instrumental narrative that effortlessly moves between dystopia and hope.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nLittle is known about Battlestations other than the basic facts: formed in Brussels, Belgium in 2009; released two albums (<em>Battlestations</em> and <em>In A Cold Embrace</em>) and two EPs (<em>Return/Mr. Abject</em> and <em>The Death Of The Day</em>); collaboration with Joe Dorsey on the Involved project. However, this shroud of anonymity feels fitting when listening to their enigmatic music. It often feels too big to attach to singular identities, and the atmosphere and mystique surrounding the songs suspends them, weightless, into a listening space unmoored from conventional reference points.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\nNo press releases yet, sorry!\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"11765\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LV1WIKvccJo?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/OKSue6CIp1A?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/HwFVigOuV3w?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/w6IyEce5NqE?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nBattlestations music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','Battlestations','','inherit','closed','closed','','11763-revision-v1','','','2015-11-19 11:24:35','2015-11-19 03:24:35','',11763,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/11763-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12953,1,'2015-09-14 22:43:09','2015-09-14 14:43:09','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]\r\n<h1>Battlestations</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft wp-image-11765\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Battlestations-300x297.jpg\" alt=\"Battlestations\" width=\"269\" height=\"266\" /><em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> –<strong> Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\nBattlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/Battlestations.music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>    <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/battlestations-music\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8764 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SoundCloud.png\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Website\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8767 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Website.png\" alt=\"Website\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]\r\n<h3>Discography</h3>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<div></div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Extent of Damage</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 307px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2161629676/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/the-extent-of-damage\">The extent of damage by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nOctober 2015\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <em>The Extent of Damage</em> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>The Death Of The Day</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 241px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=690545180/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/the-death-of-the-day\">The Death Of The Day by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nAugust 2013\r\n\r\nMelding elements of post-rock, ambient, industrial and prog, <i>The Death Of The Day</i> further refines Battlestations’ incredibly atmospheric and affecting musical output. The often dramatic shifts in mood are deftly handled, wielding enviable emotional weight.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>In a Cold Embrace</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 307px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1184022536/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/in-a-cold-embrace\">In a cold embrace by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nApril 2012\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations’ second full-length is a masterfully crafted tableau, its scale and flow only fully apparent when the last note has faded. <i>In A Cold Embrace</i> is narratively rich music, realising the potential of the album format in a way that so much music misses. This is film as sound.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Return / Mr. Abject</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 120px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/track=1950736445/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/track/return-mr-abject\">Return / Mr. Abject by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nDecember 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nThis 11-minute opus is an exercise in urgency and restraint. Layers of guitars slowly thicken over an insistent beat as an atmosphere of paranoia takes over. As with every Battlestations song \'Return / Mr. Abject\' has striking narrative detours that add another level of depth to the listening experience.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h4>Battlestations</h4>\r\n<div></div>\r\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 241px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=761205938/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/battlestations\">Battlestations by Battlestations</a></iframe>\r\nJune 2011\r\n<div></div>\r\nBattlestations\' self-titled debut album is such a wonderfully sprawling and complex piece of work that distinguishing individual songs within the whole soon becomes meaningless. Comprising three tracks, two of which are over 18 minutes long, <i>Battlestations</i> presents a shifting instrumental narrative that effortlessly moves between dystopia and hope.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nLittle is known about Battlestations other than the basic facts: formed in Brussels, Belgium in 2009; released two albums (<em>Battlestations</em> and <em>In A Cold Embrace</em>) and two EPs (<em>Return/Mr. Abject</em> and <em>The Death Of The Day</em>); collaboration with Joe Dorsey on the Involved project. However, this shroud of anonymity feels fitting when listening to their enigmatic music. It often feels too big to attach to singular identities, and the atmosphere and mystique surrounding the songs suspends them, weightless, into a listening space unmoored from conventional reference points.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-news content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=battlestations-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title] [/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\nNo press releases yet, sorry!\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"11765\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]\r\n<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LV1WIKvccJo?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/OKSue6CIp1A?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/HwFVigOuV3w?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/w6IyEce5NqE?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nBattlestations music is  available for licensing (master &amp; sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','Battlestations','','inherit','closed','closed','','11763-revision-v1','','','2015-09-14 22:43:09','2015-09-14 14:43:09','',11763,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/11763-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(13020,1,'2015-10-08 09:13:09','2015-10-08 01:13:09','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Extent-of-Damage-Cover-1200px.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12955\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Extent-of-Damage-Cover-1200px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Extent of Damage\" width=\"238\" height=\"238\" /></a>The time has come for you all the be consumed by <a title=\"Battlestations\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/battlestations/\">Battlestations\'</a> sublime new album <i>The Extent of Damage. </i> The album is available now for purchased on CD (limited edition with 12 page booklet) and in digital formats via <a title=\"Bandcamp\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/the-extent-of-damage\" target=\"_blank\">Battlestations</a>\' Bandcamp. The music video for the epic 12 minute instrumental<i> </i>‘Necro’ is also available for streaming on <a title=\"YouTube\" href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV1WIKvccJo\" data-rel=\"lightbox-video-0\">YouTube</a>.\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <i>The Extent of Damage</i> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> – <strong>Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LV1WIKvccJo?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Battlestations \"The Extent of Damage\" Out Now!','','inherit','closed','closed','','13014-autosave-v1','','','2015-10-08 09:13:09','2015-10-08 01:13:09','',13014,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/13014-autosave-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12954,1,'2015-09-14 23:15:29','2015-09-14 15:15:29','<img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12955\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Extent-of-Damage-Cover-1200px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Extent of Damage\" width=\"221\" height=\"221\" />We\'re excited to bring you the first taste of the sublime new <a title=\"Battlestations\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/battlestations/\">Battlestations</a> album <i>The Extent of Damage. </i>The music video for the epic 12 minute instrumental<i> </i>\'Necro\' is available for streaming on <a title=\"YouTube\" href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV1WIKvccJo\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube</a>.\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <i>The Extent of Damage</i> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> – <strong>Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>The Extent of Damage</em> sees official release on the 8th of October and is available now for <a title=\"The Extent of Damage\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/the-extent-of-damage\" target=\"_blank\">pre-order</a>.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LV1WIKvccJo?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Battlestations \'Necro\' Music Video','','publish','closed','closed','','battlestations-necro-music-video','','','2016-02-03 16:47:20','2016-02-03 08:47:20','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=12954',0,'post','',0),(12955,1,'2015-09-14 23:11:42','2015-09-14 15:11:42','','The Extent of Damage','','inherit','closed','closed','','the-extent-of-damage-cover-1200px','','','2015-09-14 23:12:11','2015-09-14 15:12:11','',12954,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Extent-of-Damage-Cover-1200px.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(12956,1,'2015-09-14 23:14:43','2015-09-14 15:14:43','<img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12955\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Extent-of-Damage-Cover-1200px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Extent of Damage\" width=\"221\" height=\"221\" />We\'re excited to bring you the first taste of the sublime new <a title=\"Battlestations\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/battlestations/\">Battlestations</a> album <i>The Extent of Damage. </i>The music video for the epic 12 minute instrumental<i> </i>\'Necro\' is available for streaming on <a title=\"YouTube\" href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV1WIKvccJo\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube </a>and the track is also available for download via <a title=\"BandCamp\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/the-extent-of-damage\" target=\"_blank\">BandCamp</a>.\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <i>The Extent of Damage</i> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> – <strong>Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>The Extent of Damage</em> sees official release on the 8th of October and is available now for <a title=\"The Extent of Damage\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/the-extent-of-damage\" target=\"_blank\">pre-order</a>.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LV1WIKvccJo?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Battlestations \'Necro\' Music Video','','inherit','closed','closed','','12954-revision-v1','','','2015-09-14 23:14:43','2015-09-14 15:14:43','',12954,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12954-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12959,1,'2015-09-15 17:22:33','2015-09-15 09:22:33','<img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12955\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Extent-of-Damage-Cover-1200px-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"The Extent of Damage\" width=\"221\" height=\"221\" />We\'re excited to bring you the first taste of the sublime new <a title=\"Battlestations\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/battlestations/\">Battlestations</a> album <i>The Extent of Damage. </i>The music video for the epic 12 minute instrumental<i> </i>\'Necro\' is available for streaming on <a title=\"YouTube\" href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV1WIKvccJo\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube</a>.\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <i>The Extent of Damage</i> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.\r\n\r\n<em>“one of those bands that is doing amazing things despite the fact that no one seems to have heard of them… drop whatever it is you are doing and go listen”</em> – <strong>Scene Point Blank</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>The Extent of Damage</em> sees official release on the 8th of October and is available now for <a title=\"The Extent of Damage\" href=\"http://music.battlestations.ws/album/the-extent-of-damage\" target=\"_blank\">pre-order</a>.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LV1WIKvccJo?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Battlestations \'Necro\' Music Video','','inherit','closed','closed','','12954-revision-v1','','','2015-09-15 17:22:33','2015-09-15 09:22:33','',12954,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12954-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12957,1,'2015-09-14 23:47:20','2015-09-14 15:47:20','https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV1WIKvccJo\r\n\r\n\'Necro\' comes from the sublime third album from atmospheric instrumental project <a title=\"Battlestations\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/battlestations/\">Battlestations.</a> <i>The Extent of Damage </i>will see release on the 8th of October 2015.\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <i>The Extent of Damage</i> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.','Battlestations \'Necro\'','  ','draft','closed','closed','','battlestations-necro','','','2016-01-21 13:54:22','2016-01-21 05:54:22','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=12957',0,'post','',0),(12958,1,'2015-09-14 23:47:20','2015-09-14 15:47:20','https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV1WIKvccJo\r\n\r\n\'Necro\' comes from the sublime third album from atmospheric instrumental project <a title=\"Battlestations\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/battlestations/\">Battlestations.</a> <i>The Extent of Damage </i>will see release on the 8th of October 2015.\r\n\r\nLike a high-definition camera roving across a ruined world, <i>The Extent of Damage</i> is both unflinchingly bleak and stirringly beautiful. Akin to Ennio Morricone at his most dark and doleful, and Portishead’s majestic self-titled second record, this music’s atmosphere of urban oppression is leavened with passages of sublime, redemptive beauty. Battlestations interweave the subtle with the dramatic, the intimate with the cinematic, the introverted with the bombastic. Across their eclectic and atmospheric instrumental rock, industrial ambience is counterbalanced by beautiful piano melodies, eerie samples and lyrical guitar lines. The result is incredibly evocative music, complex in both its narratives and textural composition.','Battlestations \'Necro\'','','inherit','closed','closed','','12957-revision-v1','','','2015-09-14 23:47:20','2015-09-14 15:47:20','',12957,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12960,1,'2015-09-16 11:32:23','2015-09-16 03:32:23','<strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-10433\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nMM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong>\r\n\r\n<strong> </strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:32:23','2015-09-16 03:32:23','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12961,1,'2015-09-16 11:35:16','2015-09-16 03:35:16','<strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nAs one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr <a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-10433\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nMM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong>\r\n\r\n<strong> </strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:35:16','2015-09-16 03:35:16','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12962,1,'2015-09-16 11:35:54','2015-09-16 03:35:54','<strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nMM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong>\r\n\r\n<strong> </strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:35:54','2015-09-16 03:35:54','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12964,1,'2015-09-16 11:37:02','2015-09-16 03:37:02','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:37:02','2015-09-16 03:37:02','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12963,1,'2015-09-16 11:36:20','2015-09-16 03:36:20','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:36:20','2015-09-16 03:36:20','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12965,1,'2015-09-16 11:37:54','2015-09-16 03:37:54','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr <a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:37:54','2015-09-16 03:37:54','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12966,1,'2015-09-16 11:38:31','2015-09-16 03:38:31','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:38:31','2015-09-16 03:38:31','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12967,1,'2015-09-16 11:44:30','2015-09-16 03:44:30','','Gym Live 1','','inherit','closed','closed','','gym-live-1','','','2015-09-16 11:44:30','2015-09-16 03:44:30','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(12968,1,'2015-09-16 11:47:21','2015-09-16 03:47:21','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:47:21','2015-09-16 03:47:21','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12969,1,'2015-09-16 11:48:03','2015-09-16 03:48:03','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular <a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:48:03','2015-09-16 03:48:03','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12970,1,'2015-09-16 11:48:23','2015-09-16 03:48:23','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular <a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michae<strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong>l Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:48:23','2015-09-16 03:48:23','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12971,1,'2015-09-16 11:48:50','2015-09-16 03:48:50','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his ho<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>me town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play wit<strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong>h them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:48:50','2015-09-16 03:48:50','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12972,1,'2015-09-16 11:49:23','2015-09-16 03:49:23','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance <a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play wit<strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong>h them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:49:23','2015-09-16 03:49:23','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12973,1,'2015-09-16 11:49:49','2015-09-16 03:49:49','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home to<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>wn of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – a<strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong>nd the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:49:49','2015-09-16 03:49:49','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12974,1,'2015-09-16 11:51:01','2015-09-16 03:51:01','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:51:01','2015-09-16 03:51:01','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12975,1,'2015-09-16 11:52:08','2015-09-16 03:52:08','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:52:08','2015-09-16 03:52:08','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12976,1,'2015-09-16 11:53:40','2015-09-16 03:53:40','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:53:40','2015-09-16 03:53:40','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12978,1,'2015-09-16 11:54:57','2015-09-16 03:54:57','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:54:57','2015-09-16 03:54:57','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12977,1,'2015-09-16 11:54:34','2015-09-16 03:54:34','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong> </strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:54:34','2015-09-16 03:54:34','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12979,1,'2015-09-16 11:57:22','2015-09-16 03:57:22','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, Markus Mehr isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 11:57:22','2015-09-16 03:57:22','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12980,1,'2015-09-16 21:13:13','2015-09-16 13:13:13','<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, <a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\">Markus Mehr</a> isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-16 21:13:13','2015-09-16 13:13:13','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12981,1,'2015-09-17 13:36:58','2015-09-17 05:36:58','<h3 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></h3>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, <a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\">Markus Mehr</a> isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 13:36:58','2015-09-17 05:36:58','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12982,1,'2015-09-17 13:37:52','2015-09-17 05:37:52','<h4 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Sonic Transmutation: Markus Mehr, the Modular Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University perform ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’</strong></h4>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-10433 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>As one of the shining gems in the Hidden Shoal catalogue, <a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\">Markus Mehr</a> isn’t just a musician – he’s a sound collector, an arranger, an audio artist, a field recordist and a master of aural assemblage. In June, Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>. It was the first time Mehr’s music had been given the orchestral treatment, as his inorganic sounds, field recordings and heavily effected synths were rendered acoustic by a cast of dozens of musicians before a crowd of 2,000. Mehr spoke with Matthew Tomich about this highly unusual collaboration.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: How did this performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ come about?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Back in 2008, I was working for Modular Festival in Augsburg. I was hired as a creative director or ideas person, or something like that, and my job was to create ideas and collect ideas from other people and bring in projects and art across all kinds of disciplines – not just music. All the projects lead to this new festival and we thought it would be great to connect the local music scene with the classical music scene, the pop music scene with the classical music scene. This is not new, but unless you’re Metallica, it’s impossible, as a local musician or as a starter, to play with an orchestra, so I thought it would be a great idea. And it needn’t be that typical Night of the Proms thing – do you have this in Australia, do you know what I mean?</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: No, I’m not sure what you mean.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-12967 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gym-Live-1-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Puppet on a String\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" /></a></strong><strong>MM:</strong> We have this in Europe and it’s very successful, where a bunch of aged stars from the ’80s sing their songs with a musical accompaniment embedded in an orchestral context. They fill stadiums here with this boring shit. We didn’t want this project to be like that – the songs from the bands should be cut into pieces and put together in a completely new way. It should be very unusual and new. The difficult thing was to find local conductors and writers who can deliver that, but it was successful. I had two guys at the time, both of whom had one foot in the pop context and the other in the classical context, and one of them – Michael Kamm – was also the arranger of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’. We started out in 2008 with this and called it ‘Puppet on a String’. And it was successful – very successful – and the ‘Puppet on a String’ project is still the opener of the Modular Festival. It’s become bigger and bigger over the years, and we played this year in front of 2,000 people – so that’s a great thing. The end of the story is that I only worked for them for two years, then I left it, and this year they asked me to play with them – as a kind of homage if you like, or because they love the album, I don’t know! And I thought it was a cool idea from the beginning, because it was my idea [laughs]! So it was a unique opportunity to do this stuff, and it’s obviously a fantastic thing to stand in front of a choir of 40 people and to stand in front of this orchestra – it sounds beautiful. So that’s the whole story. I invented this event because it was my job somehow, and I saw it growing, and this year they asked me, and I said yes.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: You mentioned that these arrangers and composers had one foot in pop music and one foot in classical music, but you’re neither of those things – you’re electronic music. Was that a weird area for them to negotiate?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I guess that was one of the reasons why they asked me – the challenge – and why I asked Michael Kamm to be my conductor. I think it was kind of a challenge for him as well, to write for a guy like me who’s doing strange stuff and is far out of a pop context or a song context. I guess that’s exactly what the approach was – to bring a guy that sounds like me into the project, because the other nine artists this year were singers with songs. They were heavy metal, they were songwriters – acoustic songs and stuff like that – so I was an exotic guy anyway in this whole context, and I guess they wanted to show another side of this ‘Puppet on a String’ project. I want to say: yes, it was kind of a challenge for everyone, and they wanted to bring some electronic and avant-garde kind of thing into this project.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Was it a challenge for you as well? Because most of your work performed under your name is performed solo or in collaboration with Stefanie Sixt, who does your visuals. Was it strange to relinquish control of your music in that live setting to someone else?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-9024 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sixt_mehr_goeteborg_1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr &amp; Stefanie Sixt\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>MM: </strong>It was one of the biggest things I can imagine. I was honoured and I was completely nervous about it. At the beginning I had all these questions – how can we do it? How will it turn out? Is this crap? Is it possible to do it? In a good way, I didn’t know. But from the very beginning my choice was to work together with Michael – the first guy that I’ve ever asked to do something for ‘Puppet on a String’, and also a friend of mine, so I was very close to him anyway. I knew he was a good guy and I knew he would give it the right treatment. We had a nice conversation the whole time. He was here in my studio and we had a look at the arrangement and he had the imagination for what he could do in an orchestra – this can be a part for a choir, what can you do there? – so we had a dialogue. And he had a plan right before he was starting to write down the score. We knew theoretically what each musician would do, what would be the part of the orchestra, what would be the part for me. But it was a big challenge for the orchestra as well, and for the choir, until we brought them all together on one stage. If you look at the video, you’ll see that the choir starts out with the paper thing, they do a kind of scrunching noise, so they don’t sing until minute three or four. They have to do funny things with their feet and stuff like that. So for the whole performance, the plan was to go along with this John Cage approach. My music doesn’t have measures or beats per minute.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: There’s no rhythm, right?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">MM: Yeah, nothing at all. And one of Michael’s great ideas was to play with clocks – no conducting. Everybody was looking at clocks. You see at the beginning these great clocks on the screen, and everybody was looking – OK, this is 1:20, now it’s my part to do this. It’s a very John Cage-y thing. It’s not possible to conduct fragments like that. It was a timetable and that’s the magic touch.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Did you have much interaction with the rest of the orchestra and the choir, or was that all done through Michael?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> I was there for two rehearsals and I knew what they’d do, and after that, I had a conversation with Michael – oh, I don’t like this, what do you think of this – so we discussed a few things, but most of the time, Michael was the leader and communicated with all the musicians. It was very quick – we only had one rehearsal with the orchestra, the day before we performed – and I had two rehearsals with the choir, but I had nothing to do; I was just a listener. So it came together very quickly and Michael was the communicator. And on stage as well – everybody knew what to do when the time was there, so we didn’t have to look at Michael as a conductor, but you see him conducting the choir – louder, louder, stay – you see what he did with his hands. So they looked at him and he was the medium, and I had my timetable and did my thing like the other people on stage as well. I looked at the clock and played my parts when I had to.</p>\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>Last time we spoke, you talked about the duality of your work and the relationship between warm and cold, and organic and inorganic. When your samples are rendered live by an orchestra and electronic music becomes acoustic, or when the choir starts bursting into chatter to mimic the sample you have, is that the ultimate realisation of what you’re trying to do with opposites?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Yes, I would say so. But it’s unusual – you spend so much time trying to find new sounds or to tweak sounds to make them sound new or different or inorganic or strange, and often the sounds came from natural instruments. You tweak knobs and then it doesn’t sound like a trumpet. And all of a sudden you stand on stage with someone playing a trombone, and he’s playing the sound again like an elephant – that’s strange. It’s the opposite of what you tend to do. It comes full circle. Believe me, it’s so strange. But it’s so much fun – I guess if we were to have this conversation five or six years ago, maybe I wouldn’t feel so comfortable with it because my direction was to move away from anything like music. That’s still the direction. But I think it has a sense of humour, or it’s more relaxed, to put it back together in wood and instruments and hear my music in a classical context. Sound-wise, it’s so impressive, if you stand on stage with an orchestra, and I’d never done that. That alone is a wonderful experience – I wouldn’t want to miss that. And everybody involved was so kind and so friendly and so ambitious to do this right for me. I have to point out that nobody in the choir knew me. Some of the musicians on stage knew me from previous projects, but everybody was so keen to make the best of the track, and what Michael did with the arrangement was a blast.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: Are there any plans to do something like that again? You mentioned you were collaborating with Michael on something else.</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> A few days after, Michael and I sat in my kitchen, and we were very ambitious about putting it together again. We had some plans to do the whole album like that, but to be honest, this is not possible. You can’t put together an orchestra, you can’t hold together this choir – it takes too much time and money. And also for Michael as a conductor and as a writer – it took a few days for him to score it. It would be a dream, but I don’t think it will happen again. So, to be honest, I think this was it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: What else are you working on right now? What’s coming up in the future for you?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-6987 size-medium\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Markus_Mehr_51-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a><strong>MM:</strong> At the moment, I’m working on a few things. When we finish this interview, I’ll go back to work on the next couple of albums. I’m working on the last two tracks for the next album, and that’s pencilled in for release in March. So I want to finish that, hopefully this week or next week. After that I’m working on another album – a new project called Low Delayer with my dear friend, Tom Hessler. It’s not completely different to my sound, but it’s quite different. I’d say we are swimming in the pool of post-techno. We’re working with modular synthesizers and my field recordings, bringing both worlds together and doing something that’s not really connected to techno in a pure form, but it has a kind of dance-y feeling. We only play with sounds and make rhythm-like things with sounds recorded from lights, light bulbs, display boards, etc. No drums. Hidden Shoal will release a remix EP from my current album in October, which I’m putting together at the moment. Along with that I’m doing some live performances on my own, and in October, Stefanie and I will play some shows with our new performance, <em>Re-Directed</em>, in Germany and Sweden. So, that’s happening in the coming weeks.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT: And is Low Delayer something you’re going to do with Hidden Shoal, or something you want to do with another label?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> We want to finish the whole project first. I was in Berlin last week and we did three tracks, very rough. That was a three-day session and we picked three pieces from what we did, so now we can see the material clearly. We will have at least 40 minutes of music, and when it’s finished we will think about what we want to do with it. There are no other plans, but there are definitely plans to release it, that’s for sure. I’m not a guy who lets things get stale on my hard disk. I want to release it. Cam at Hidden Shoal will be one of the first to hear it.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MT:</strong> <strong>And as for the new album under your name, what can you tell us about that? How’s it sounding, how’s it different?</strong></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MM:</strong> Well, I’ve finished two different pieces. <em>Re-Directed </em>is one, and a second one, called <em>Dyschronia,</em> is finished as well. To be honest, I’m not sure which one I want to release first. That’s a luxury! <em>Re-Directed </em>deals with the abuse of power in connection with modern technology and communication devices. For this project I recorded tons of sound from servers, hard disks, mobile phones and stuff like that. It’s interesting how different they all sound, by the way. On <em>Dyschronia </em>I’ve experimented with a very different workflow. I’ve been working on that material for more than four years now. It’s about breaks in time, about leaving things alone and coming back, leaving them alone again and coming back again. It’s about sticking with things, looking at them in different ways and from new perspectives in order to observe how things – in this case, sounds – change over time. Time is a luxury in the modern world we live in. I know, musically this says nothing – you’ll have to listen to it when it’s released.</p>','Sonic Transmutation: An Interview with Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','12946-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 13:37:52','2015-09-17 05:37:52','',12946,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12946-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12983,1,'2015-09-17 13:54:51','2015-09-17 05:54:51','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12984\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Gymnasium Swarms Liva\" width=\"192\" height=\"192\" /></a>In June 2015, <a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\">Markus Mehr</a> performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>.\r\n\r\nWe\'re excited to be able to share the <a title=\"Vimeo\" href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> of that performance along with a re-mastered <a title=\"BandCamp\" href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra\" target=\"_blank\">audio download</a> and a brilliant <a title=\"Interview with Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/sonic-transmutation-an-interview-with-markus-mehr/\" target=\"_blank\">interview</a> with Mehr by Matthew Tomich. We hope you enjoy this sublime document of Mehr\'s brilliance and the power of collaboration.\r\n\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.','Markus Mehr Live with Orchestra - Video, Download and Interview','','publish','closed','closed','','markus-mehr-live-with-orchestra-video-download-and-interview','','','2016-02-03 15:51:49','2016-02-03 07:51:49','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=12983',0,'post','',0),(12984,1,'2015-09-17 13:49:30','2015-09-17 05:49:30','','Gymnasium Swarms Liva','','inherit','closed','closed','','gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra','','','2015-09-17 13:49:43','2015-09-17 05:49:43','',12983,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(12985,1,'2015-09-17 13:50:04','2015-09-17 05:50:04','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12984\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Gymnasium Swarms Liva\" width=\"211\" height=\"211\" /></a>In June 2015, Markus Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>.\r\n\r\nWe\'re excited to be able to share the <a title=\"Vimeo\" href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> of that performance along with a re-mastered <a title=\"BandCamp\" href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra\" target=\"_blank\">audio download</a> and a brilliant <a title=\"Interview with Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/sonic-transmutation-an-interview-with-markus-mehr/\" target=\"_blank\">interview</a> with Mehr by Matthew Tomich.','Markus Mehr Live with Orchestra - Video, Download and Interview','','inherit','closed','closed','','12983-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 13:50:04','2015-09-17 05:50:04','',12983,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12983-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12986,1,'2015-09-17 13:52:11','2015-09-17 05:52:11','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12984\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Gymnasium Swarms Liva\" width=\"197\" height=\"197\" /></a>In June 2015, Markus Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>.\r\n\r\nWe\'re excited to be able to share the <a title=\"Vimeo\" href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> of that performance along with a re-mastered <a title=\"BandCamp\" href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra\" target=\"_blank\">audio download</a> and a brilliant <a title=\"Interview with Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/sonic-transmutation-an-interview-with-markus-mehr/\" target=\"_blank\">interview</a> with Mehr by Matthew Tomich.\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.','Markus Mehr Live with Orchestra - Video, Download and Interview','','inherit','closed','closed','','12983-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 13:52:11','2015-09-17 05:52:11','',12983,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12983-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12987,1,'2015-09-17 13:53:45','2015-09-17 05:53:45','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12984\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Gymnasium Swarms Liva\" width=\"192\" height=\"192\" /></a>In June 2015, Markus Mehr performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>.\r\n\r\nWe\'re excited to be able to share the <a title=\"Vimeo\" href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> of that performance along with a re-mastered <a title=\"BandCamp\" href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra\" target=\"_blank\">audio download</a> and a brilliant <a title=\"Interview with Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/sonic-transmutation-an-interview-with-markus-mehr/\" target=\"_blank\">interview</a> with Mehr by Matthew Tomich. We hope you enjoy this sublime document of Mehr\'s brilliance and the power of collaboration.\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.','Markus Mehr Live with Orchestra - Video, Download and Interview','','inherit','closed','closed','','12983-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 13:53:45','2015-09-17 05:53:45','',12983,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12983-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12988,1,'2015-09-17 13:54:51','2015-09-17 05:54:51','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12984\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gymnasium-Swarms-Live-with-Orchestra-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Gymnasium Swarms Liva\" width=\"192\" height=\"192\" /></a>In June 2015, <a title=\"Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/markus-mehr/\">Markus Mehr</a> performed at the Modular Festival in his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria. But this was no usual Markus Mehr performance. Along with his regular collaborator, video artist Stefanie Sixt, Mehr was joined by the Chamber Choir of Augsburg University, the Modular Orchestra, and conductor Michael Kamm in a performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’ from <em>Binary Rooms</em>.\r\n\r\nWe\'re excited to be able to share the <a title=\"Vimeo\" href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> of that performance along with a re-mastered <a title=\"BandCamp\" href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra\" target=\"_blank\">audio download</a> and a brilliant <a title=\"Interview with Markus Mehr\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/sonic-transmutation-an-interview-with-markus-mehr/\" target=\"_blank\">interview</a> with Mehr by Matthew Tomich. We hope you enjoy this sublime document of Mehr\'s brilliance and the power of collaboration.\r\n\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://player.vimeo.com/video/138941094?color=ffffff&amp;title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://vimeo.com/138941094\">Markus Mehr - Gymnasium/Swarms (Live with Orchestra)</a> from <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/hiddenshoal\">Hidden Shoal</a> on <a href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo</a>.','Markus Mehr Live with Orchestra - Video, Download and Interview','','inherit','closed','closed','','12983-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 13:54:51','2015-09-17 05:54:51','',12983,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12983-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12989,1,'2015-09-17 14:07:15','2015-09-17 06:07:15','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]<h1>Markus Mehr</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-10435\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-2-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /><em>“... prepare for a shuddering, near chaotic, kaleidoscopic </em><em>experience as Mehr challenges our and his own </em><em>preconceptions of what “electronica” is, what it represents </em><em>and of what his instrumentation can achieve.”<strong> – Delusions of Adequacy</strong></em>\r\n\r\nMarkus Mehr’s debut, <em>Lava</em>, holds true to its title – it is a dense, steaming surge of glue-thick sound. But, after any destructive force there is new growth. Green shoots of melody arc out of the surface and populate the terrain as new possibilities emerge. <span class=\"_5yl5\" data-reactid=\".27.$mid=11404191394044=243362f841034556913.2:0.0.0.0.0\"><span class=\"null\">His follow-up triptych of works (<em>In</em>, <em>On</em> and <em>Off</em>) brought another level of conceptual and sonic experimentation to the table, advancing his stature in the field of contemporary experimental music.</span></span>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"http://www.facebook.com/markus.mehr\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Twitter\" href=\"https://twitter.com/MarkusMehr\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8766 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Twitter.png\" alt=\"Twitter\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"http://soundcloud.com/markus-mehr\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8764 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SoundCloud.png\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Website\" href=\"http://www.markusmehr.de/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8767 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Website.png\" alt=\"Website\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>   <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/markus-mehr/id299102328?uo=4&at=11lRii\" target=\"itunes_store\" style=\"display:inline-block;overflow:hidden;background:url(https://linkmaker.itunes.apple.com/htmlResources/assets//images/web/linkmaker/badge_itunes-sm.png) no-repeat;width:45px;height:15px;@media only screen{background-image:url(https://linkmaker.itunes.apple.com/htmlResources/assets//images/web/linkmaker/badge_itunes-sm.svg);}\"></a>[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]<h3>Discography</h3><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Gymnasium​/​Swarms - Live with Orchestra</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 208px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=641842681/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra\">Gymnasium/Swarms - Live with Orchestra by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> September 2015</p><div> </div><p>‘Gymnasium/Swarms Live with Orchestra’ is a an amazing re-working of the original track, which appears in its original form on Mehr’s latest album, Binary Rooms. This special performance includes live orchestra and choir along with visuals by Stefanie Sixt.</p><p>As Markus Mehr explains in a new interview with Hidden Shoal’s Matthew Tomich, the live performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’, which opened this year’s Modular Festival in Augsburg, Germany, involved Mehr’s collaboration with conductor Michael Kamm, plus the Modular Orchestra and Chamber Choir of Augsburg University. The live video by Florian Strandl depicts the musicians masterful reinterpretation of the music’s evocative, beatless soundworld via the clever use of clocks and Michael Kamm’s conducting. From rustling paper and shuffling feet, to gorgeous sustained choral tones and vibraphone, ‘Gymnasium/Swarms Live with Orchestra’ is a unique performance of a deeply evocative piece of sound art.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>To Set The River On Fire</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 274px;\" src=\"https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1811294613/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://hiddenshoal.bandcamp.com/album/to-set-the-river-on-fire\">To Set The River On Fire by Chloe March vs. Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> February 2015</p><div> </div><p>The new EP release To Set The River On Fire opens a window into a new universe of possibilities: Hidden Shoal artists remixing each other’s music. In the first of what we hope will become an ongoing series, English dream-pop artist Chloë March takes on a track from the latest album by German experimentalist Markus Mehr – and vice versa. Listening to ‘Buoy (Chloë March Remix)’ feels like watching Chloë March creep tentatively into Markus Mehr’s shadowy soundworld, casting her radiant voice around the room like torchlight. While on ‘Ember (Markus Mehr Remix)’, the original’s beautifully simple arrangement for voice and piano is trapped within a hall of industrial-sized mirrors, anxiously roving around in search of escape. Each remix complements the other, masterfully re-interpreting the source material while inviting fresh listens to the original.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Binary Rooms</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 406px;\" src=\"https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3445084080/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/binary-rooms\">Binary Rooms by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> October 2014</p><div> </div><p>Mehr’s work has seen a subtle shift in scale across his five studio albums. From the widescreen cosmic vistas of <em>Lava</em> to some of the more intimate moments of his 42-minute single-track opus <em>Off</em>, Mehr has now come to examine the most challenging space yet – that of our everyday lives and the spatial narratives that surround us. Mehr’s music has always possessed a keen sense of and negotiation with scale, and on <em>Binary Rooms</em> he challenges notions of personal space, juxtaposing the human against the industrial, the gentle and intimate against the jolting and harsh. Mehr acts as a fragment hunter, meshing machine-like tones with the discarded elements of humanity; narrative with anti-narrative. On <em>Binary Rooms</em> he manages to create a spatial remix – a striking re-design of aural reality filled with a living, digital biology. Experimental filmmaker and Markus Mehr collaborator <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/sixtsense/videos\">Stefanie Sixt</a> has created a stunning new video work for the track \'Gymnasium/Swarms\' which can be viewed in full at <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/105644655\" rel=\"lightbox-video-0\">Vimeo.</a></p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Off</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 170px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=398032740/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/off\">Off by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> January 2013</p><div> </div><p><em>Off</em>  by German experimental ambient artist Markus Mehr, is the third and final part of a trilogy that includes the critically acclaimed releases <em>In</em> and <em>On</em>. <em>Off</em>  is not only the culmination of Markus Mehr’s trilogy, but it may also be the culmination of his career’s work thus far. The single-track album begins in silence, as a thrumming loop gradually emerges. From there, a beautiful piano refrain is introduced, noise ebbs and flows, threatening to engulf the piece, while field recordings and swooningly transportive synth patterns drift into focus. During its 42-minute runtime, the piece immerses the listener in a dizzyingly beautiful soundworld that’s ever-shifting. Certain passages allude to other sequences and samples in the preceding albums, linking the three albums into a kaleidoscopic mobius strip.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>On</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 406px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2332510059/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/on\">On by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> July 2012</p><div> </div><p>The new album <em>On</em> by German experimental ambient artist Markus Mehr, forms the second part of a triptych that also includes recent release <em>In</em> and the forthcoming <em>Off</em>. <em>On</em> is a continuation of the experimental direction of Markus Mehr’s previous releases, with eight diverse tracks employing samples, field recordings and slathers of Mehr’s trademark distorted drones. This approach is apparent right from opener ‘Gonna Make You Mine’, as scything slashes of sound leap from the speakers. Single ‘Flaming Youth’ counterbalances fragments of static against a gorgeous sleepy-eyed loop of mangled lounge-jazz. A track as expansive and moving as ‘Duck Became Swan’ is followed by brief rhythmic piece ‘Olympia’. This tightrope walk between dizzying samples and exacting digital manipulation is walked with aplomb throughout <em>On</em>’s adventurous and thrilling 45-minute runtime. <em>On</em> is preceded by <em>In</em>, the first part of the triptych, which comprises two monumental tracks, ‘Komo’ and ‘Ostinato’, each of which clocks in at around 25 minutes, circling around and building upon hypnotic instrumental motifs. The final part of the triptych, Off, released on 24 January 2013, includes the most epic piece yet, ‘Transit’, which clocks in at 49 minutes and will be performed live in collaboration with video artist Stefanie Sixt, who created the video to Mehr’s single ‘Cousteau’.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>In</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 210px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=4000928914/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/in\">In by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> January 2012</p><div> </div><p>Markus Mehr follows up his stunning debut album <em>Lava</em> with three new releases released over a 12 month period. In is the first part of the triptych, comprising two monumental tracks, ‘Komo’ and ‘Ostinato’, each of which clocks in at around 25 minutes, circling around and building upon hypnotic instrumental motifs. ‘Komo’ gradually emerges from silence, its distant, filtered throb reluctantly revealing its source material – a heartbreaking string part whose emotional impact intensifies as the loop clarifies. ‘Ostinato’ is an altogether darker, gnarlier experience, its string loops chewed into distorted knots which are highlighted by treated guitars and crafted electronics. The second part, <em>On</em>, released on 21 June 2012, takes a more experimental direction, with eight diverse tracks employing samples, field recordings and slathers of Mehr’s trademark distorted drones. And finally, <em>Off</em>, released on 24 January 2013, includes the most epic piece yet, ‘Transit’, which clocks in at 49 minutes and will be performed live in collaboration with video artist Stefanie Sixt, who created the video to Mehr’s single ‘Cousteau’.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Lava</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 439px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=634202850/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/lava\">Lava by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> August 2010</p><div> </div><p><em>Lava</em> holds true to its title – it is a dense surge of glue-think sound, making new paths as it pushes through the landscape. But, after any destructive force there is new growth. Green shoots of melody arc out of the surface and populate the terrain as new possibilities emerge. A new master of heartbreaking ambient drone has arrived. These tracks evoke time spent transfixed, gazing through a giant looking glass, waiting wide-eyed as new discoveries are revealed in the album’s textured contours. On epic opener ‘Agenda’, layers of gorgeous synth gradually accumulate into a gloriously massive chord. On single ‘Hubble’, a bedrock of fuzzed drone is decorated with glistening counter-melodies, tracing shards of light across the coal-black skies. ‘Softwar’ builds and then falls away, only to return with a spine-tingling theme that crumbles under its own majesty. <em>Lava</em>’s ability to both suspend the listener in its abstracted liquid vapours and at the same time imprint its affecting narrative is a special thing. It is one of those albums whose emotional impact stays with you long after you feel its last touch.</p>[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nBased in Augsburg, south Germany, Markus Mehr’s musical journey began with the guitar. He grew up listening to bands like Black Sabbath and AC/DC, before turning his ears to darker sounds and the ethereal, experimental pop of David Sylvian. After recording and touring with several bands, he struck out on his own with home studio project Aroma.\r\n\r\nNow working under his own name, Mehr wrote and recorded his debut album <em>Lava</em> at his home studio using guitars and synths, plus any noise-making accoutrements at hand – electric shavers, ventilators, electric tooth brushes and field recordings –all processed and distorted to create a gorgeous wall of sound, akin to the classic ’70s Kosmische music of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, but also the contemporary masters of textured luminosity, Fennesz and Tim Hecker. His follow up albums, <em>In</em>, <em>On</em> and <em>Off </em> pushed the sonic and structural envelope even further and created a triptych of works that stands amongst the most engaging contemporary experimental music of our days.\r\n\r\nMehr’s extensive live performances across Europe include collaborations with visual artist Stefanie Sixt and performances in churches, galleries and large disused gas tanks amongst the more traditional festival shows.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n\r\n \r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=markus-mehr content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n\r\n \r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=markus-mehr-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Live_In_Bari.pdf\"><em>Live in Bari</em> Album Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Off.pdf\"><em>Off</em> Album Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Duck_Became_Swan.pdf\">‘Duck Became Swan’ Single Release and Music Video</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Flaming_Youth.pdf\">‘Flaming Youth’ Single Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-In.pdf\"><em>In</em> Album Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Cousteau.pdf\">‘Cousteau’ Single Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Lava_Digital_Release.pdf\"><em>Lava</em> Album Digital Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Hubble_Single.pdf\">‘Hubble’ Single Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Signing.pdf\">Markus Mehr Signs to Hidden Shoal</a>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n \r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"10433,10435,9020,9021,9022,9023,9024,9025,9019\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/NNOsYOGPyik?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen></iframe>\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/dGRCY37hMm4?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/PcfMLHZZomw?rel=0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> <iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/1jIYi486n0c?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nMarkus Mehr\'s music is  available for licensing (master & sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','9007-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 14:07:15','2015-09-17 06:07:15','',9007,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/9007-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12990,1,'2015-09-17 14:11:58','2015-09-17 06:11:58','[et_pb_section fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" background_color=\"#050505\" inner_shadow=\"off\" parallax=\"off\" parallax_method=\"css\"][et_pb_column type=\"3_4\" specialty_columns=\"3\"][et_pb_row_inner][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\"][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Text\" background_layout=\"light\" text_orientation=\"left\"]<h1>Markus Mehr</h1>\r\n<img class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-10435\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Markus-Mehr-2014-2-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Markus Mehr\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /><em>“... prepare for a shuddering, near chaotic, kaleidoscopic </em><em>experience as Mehr challenges our and his own </em><em>preconceptions of what “electronica” is, what it represents </em><em>and of what his instrumentation can achieve.”<strong> – Delusions of Adequacy</strong></em>\r\n\r\nMarkus Mehr’s debut, <em>Lava</em>, holds true to its title – it is a dense, steaming surge of glue-thick sound. But, after any destructive force there is new growth. Green shoots of melody arc out of the surface and populate the terrain as new possibilities emerge. <span class=\"_5yl5\" data-reactid=\".27.$mid=11404191394044=243362f841034556913.2:0.0.0.0.0\"><span class=\"null\">His follow-up triptych of works (<em>In</em>, <em>On</em> and <em>Off</em>) brought another level of conceptual and sonic experimentation to the table, advancing his stature in the field of contemporary experimental music.</span></span>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Facebook\" href=\"http://www.facebook.com/markus.mehr\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8763 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Facebook.png\" alt=\"Facebook\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Twitter\" href=\"https://twitter.com/MarkusMehr\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8766 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Twitter.png\" alt=\"Twitter\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"http://soundcloud.com/markus-mehr\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8764 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/SoundCloud.png\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>  <a title=\"Website\" href=\"http://www.markusmehr.de/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone wp-image-8767 size-full\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Website.png\" alt=\"Website\" width=\"26\" height=\"20\" /></a>   <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/markus-mehr/id299102328?uo=4&at=11lRii\" target=\"itunes_store\" style=\"display:inline-block;overflow:hidden;background:url(https://linkmaker.itunes.apple.com/htmlResources/assets//images/web/linkmaker/badge_itunes-sm.png) no-repeat;width:45px;height:15px;@media only screen{background-image:url(https://linkmaker.itunes.apple.com/htmlResources/assets//images/web/linkmaker/badge_itunes-sm.svg);}\"></a>[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider admin_label=\"Divider\" color=\"#ffffff\" show_divider=\"off\" /][et_pb_tabs admin_label=\"Artist Tabs\"][et_pb_tab title=\"Discography\"]<h3>Discography</h3><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Gymnasium​/​Swarms - Live with Orchestra</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 208px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=641842681/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/gymnasium-swarms-live-with-orchestra\">Gymnasium/Swarms - Live with Orchestra by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> September 2015</p><div> </div><p>‘Gymnasium/Swarms Live with Orchestra’ is a an amazing re-working of the original track, which appears in its original form on Mehr’s latest album, Binary Rooms. This special performance includes live orchestra and choir along with visuals by Stefanie Sixt.</p><p>As Markus Mehr explains in a new interview with Hidden Shoal’s Matthew Tomich, the live performance of ‘Gymnasium/Swarms’, which opened this year’s Modular Festival in Augsburg, Germany, involved Mehr’s collaboration with conductor Michael Kamm, plus the Modular Orchestra and Chamber Choir of Augsburg University. The live video by Florian Strandl depicts the musicians masterful reinterpretation of the music’s evocative, beatless soundworld via the clever use of clocks and Michael Kamm’s conducting. From rustling paper and shuffling feet, to gorgeous sustained choral tones and vibraphone, ‘Gymnasium/Swarms Live with Orchestra’ is a unique performance of a deeply evocative piece of sound art.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>To Set The River On Fire</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 274px;\" src=\"https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1811294613/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://hiddenshoal.bandcamp.com/album/to-set-the-river-on-fire\">To Set The River On Fire by Chloe March vs. Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> February 2015</p><div> </div><p>The new EP release To Set The River On Fire opens a window into a new universe of possibilities: Hidden Shoal artists remixing each other’s music. In the first of what we hope will become an ongoing series, English dream-pop artist Chloë March takes on a track from the latest album by German experimentalist Markus Mehr – and vice versa. Listening to ‘Buoy (Chloë March Remix)’ feels like watching Chloë March creep tentatively into Markus Mehr’s shadowy soundworld, casting her radiant voice around the room like torchlight. While on ‘Ember (Markus Mehr Remix)’, the original’s beautifully simple arrangement for voice and piano is trapped within a hall of industrial-sized mirrors, anxiously roving around in search of escape. Each remix complements the other, masterfully re-interpreting the source material while inviting fresh listens to the original.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Binary Rooms</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 406px;\" src=\"https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3445084080/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/binary-rooms\">Binary Rooms by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> October 2014</p><div> </div><p>Mehr’s work has seen a subtle shift in scale across his five studio albums. From the widescreen cosmic vistas of <em>Lava</em> to some of the more intimate moments of his 42-minute single-track opus <em>Off</em>, Mehr has now come to examine the most challenging space yet – that of our everyday lives and the spatial narratives that surround us. Mehr’s music has always possessed a keen sense of and negotiation with scale, and on <em>Binary Rooms</em> he challenges notions of personal space, juxtaposing the human against the industrial, the gentle and intimate against the jolting and harsh. Mehr acts as a fragment hunter, meshing machine-like tones with the discarded elements of humanity; narrative with anti-narrative. On <em>Binary Rooms</em> he manages to create a spatial remix – a striking re-design of aural reality filled with a living, digital biology. Experimental filmmaker and Markus Mehr collaborator <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/sixtsense/videos\">Stefanie Sixt</a> has created a stunning new video work for the track \'Gymnasium/Swarms\' which can be viewed in full at <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/105644655\" rel=\"lightbox-video-0\">Vimeo.</a></p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Off</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 170px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=398032740/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/off\">Off by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> January 2013</p><div> </div><p><em>Off</em>  by German experimental ambient artist Markus Mehr, is the third and final part of a trilogy that includes the critically acclaimed releases <em>In</em> and <em>On</em>. <em>Off</em>  is not only the culmination of Markus Mehr’s trilogy, but it may also be the culmination of his career’s work thus far. The single-track album begins in silence, as a thrumming loop gradually emerges. From there, a beautiful piano refrain is introduced, noise ebbs and flows, threatening to engulf the piece, while field recordings and swooningly transportive synth patterns drift into focus. During its 42-minute runtime, the piece immerses the listener in a dizzyingly beautiful soundworld that’s ever-shifting. Certain passages allude to other sequences and samples in the preceding albums, linking the three albums into a kaleidoscopic mobius strip.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>On</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 406px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2332510059/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/on\">On by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> July 2012</p><div> </div><p>The new album <em>On</em> by German experimental ambient artist Markus Mehr, forms the second part of a triptych that also includes recent release <em>In</em> and the forthcoming <em>Off</em>. <em>On</em> is a continuation of the experimental direction of Markus Mehr’s previous releases, with eight diverse tracks employing samples, field recordings and slathers of Mehr’s trademark distorted drones. This approach is apparent right from opener ‘Gonna Make You Mine’, as scything slashes of sound leap from the speakers. Single ‘Flaming Youth’ counterbalances fragments of static against a gorgeous sleepy-eyed loop of mangled lounge-jazz. A track as expansive and moving as ‘Duck Became Swan’ is followed by brief rhythmic piece ‘Olympia’. This tightrope walk between dizzying samples and exacting digital manipulation is walked with aplomb throughout <em>On</em>’s adventurous and thrilling 45-minute runtime. <em>On</em> is preceded by <em>In</em>, the first part of the triptych, which comprises two monumental tracks, ‘Komo’ and ‘Ostinato’, each of which clocks in at around 25 minutes, circling around and building upon hypnotic instrumental motifs. The final part of the triptych, Off, released on 24 January 2013, includes the most epic piece yet, ‘Transit’, which clocks in at 49 minutes and will be performed live in collaboration with video artist Stefanie Sixt, who created the video to Mehr’s single ‘Cousteau’.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>In</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 210px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=4000928914/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/in\">In by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> January 2012</p><div> </div><p>Markus Mehr follows up his stunning debut album <em>Lava</em> with three new releases released over a 12 month period. In is the first part of the triptych, comprising two monumental tracks, ‘Komo’ and ‘Ostinato’, each of which clocks in at around 25 minutes, circling around and building upon hypnotic instrumental motifs. ‘Komo’ gradually emerges from silence, its distant, filtered throb reluctantly revealing its source material – a heartbreaking string part whose emotional impact intensifies as the loop clarifies. ‘Ostinato’ is an altogether darker, gnarlier experience, its string loops chewed into distorted knots which are highlighted by treated guitars and crafted electronics. The second part, <em>On</em>, released on 21 June 2012, takes a more experimental direction, with eight diverse tracks employing samples, field recordings and slathers of Mehr’s trademark distorted drones. And finally, <em>Off</em>, released on 24 January 2013, includes the most epic piece yet, ‘Transit’, which clocks in at 49 minutes and will be performed live in collaboration with video artist Stefanie Sixt, who created the video to Mehr’s single ‘Cousteau’.</p><div> </div><div> </div><h4>Lava</h4><div> </div><p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 500px; height: 439px;\" src=\"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=634202850/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=ffffff/artwork=small/transparent=true/\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"http://markusmehr.bandcamp.com/album/lava\">Lava by Markus Mehr</a></iframe><br /> August 2010</p><div> </div><p><em>Lava</em> holds true to its title – it is a dense surge of glue-think sound, making new paths as it pushes through the landscape. But, after any destructive force there is new growth. Green shoots of melody arc out of the surface and populate the terrain as new possibilities emerge. A new master of heartbreaking ambient drone has arrived. These tracks evoke time spent transfixed, gazing through a giant looking glass, waiting wide-eyed as new discoveries are revealed in the album’s textured contours. On epic opener ‘Agenda’, layers of gorgeous synth gradually accumulate into a gloriously massive chord. On single ‘Hubble’, a bedrock of fuzzed drone is decorated with glistening counter-melodies, tracing shards of light across the coal-black skies. ‘Softwar’ builds and then falls away, only to return with a spine-tingling theme that crumbles under its own majesty. <em>Lava</em>’s ability to both suspend the listener in its abstracted liquid vapours and at the same time imprint its affecting narrative is a special thing. It is one of those albums whose emotional impact stays with you long after you feel its last touch.</p>[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Bio\"]\r\n<h3>Biography</h3>\r\nBased in Augsburg, south Germany, Markus Mehr’s musical journey began with the guitar. He grew up listening to bands like Black Sabbath and AC/DC, before turning his ears to darker sounds and the ethereal, experimental pop of David Sylvian. After recording and touring with several bands, he struck out on his own with home studio project Aroma.\r\n\r\nNow working under his own name, Mehr wrote and recorded his debut album <em>Lava</em> at his home studio using guitars and synths, plus any noise-making accoutrements at hand – electric shavers, ventilators, electric tooth brushes and field recordings –all processed and distorted to create a gorgeous wall of sound, akin to the classic ’70s Kosmische music of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, but also the contemporary masters of textured luminosity, Fennesz and Tim Hecker. His follow up albums, <em>In</em>, <em>On</em> and <em>Off </em> pushed the sonic and structural envelope even further and created a triptych of works that stands amongst the most engaging contemporary experimental music of our days.\r\n\r\nMehr’s extensive live performances across Europe include collaborations with visual artist Stefanie Sixt and performances in churches, galleries and large disused gas tanks amongst the more traditional festival shows.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"News\"]\r\n\r\n \r\n<h3>News</h3>\r\n[catlist name=markus-mehr content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Reviews\"]\r\n\r\n \r\n<h2>Reviews</h2>\r\n[catlist name=markus-mehr-reviews content=yes pagination=no title_tag=h4 title_class=lcp_title]\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Press Releases\"]\r\n<h3>Press Releases</h3>\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Live_In_Bari.pdf\"><em>Live in Bari</em> Album Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Off.pdf\"><em>Off</em> Album Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Duck_Became_Swan.pdf\">‘Duck Became Swan’ Single Release and Music Video</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-Flaming_Youth.pdf\">‘Flaming Youth’ Single Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr-In.pdf\"><em>In</em> Album Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Cousteau.pdf\">‘Cousteau’ Single Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Lava_Digital_Release.pdf\"><em>Lava</em> Album Digital Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Hubble_Single.pdf\">‘Hubble’ Single Release</a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"../../publicity/press-releases/HSR_Press_Release-Markus_Mehr_Signing.pdf\">Markus Mehr Signs to Hidden Shoal</a>\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Gallery\"]\r\n<h3>Artist Photos</h3>\r\n \r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"10433,10435,9020,9021,9022,9023,9024,9025,9019\"]\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Video\"]<h3>Music Videos</h3>\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/NNOsYOGPyik?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> \r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ghve0iRVjOI?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen></iframe>\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/dGRCY37hMm4?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> \r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/PcfMLHZZomw?rel=0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe> \r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"//www.youtube.com/embed/1jIYi486n0c?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>[/et_pb_tab][et_pb_tab title=\"Licensing\"]\r\n<h3>Licensing</h3>\r\nMarkus Mehr\'s music is  available for licensing (master & sync cleared) through Hidden Shoal. Please <a title=\"Contact Us\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/contact-us/\">contact us</a> with some basic details about your project and the track(s) you wish to use and we’ll be sure to get back to you straight away.\r\n\r\n[/et_pb_tab][/et_pb_tabs][/et_pb_column_inner][/et_pb_row_inner][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_4\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Sidebar\" orientation=\"left\" area=\"sidebar-1\" background_layout=\"light\" module_id=\"shoalsidebar\" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_section]','Markus Mehr','','inherit','closed','closed','','9007-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 14:11:58','2015-09-17 06:11:58','',9007,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/9007-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12991,1,'2015-09-17 16:41:48','2015-09-17 08:41:48','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"203\" height=\"203\" /></a>We\'re very excited to present ‘<a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">Broadcast History</a>’, the first taste of the debut self-titled EP from atmospheric rock trio <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA. </a>The track prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a>, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\r\n\r\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n\'Broadcast History\' is available for streaming now via <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">SoundCloud</a>. AWMA\'s self-titled EP sees release on the 14th of October 2015.\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223166722&amp;color=000000&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>','Debut AWMA Single - \'Broadcast History\'','','publish','closed','closed','','debut-awma-single-broadcast-history','','','2016-02-03 16:47:20','2016-02-03 08:47:20','',0,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/?p=12991',0,'post','',0),(12992,1,'2015-09-17 14:32:33','2015-09-17 06:32:33','We\'re very excited to present ‘Broadcast History’, the first taste of the debut self-title EP from atmospheric rock trio AWMA The track prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation Half Film, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\r\n\r\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin ([the] caseworker) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance.','Debut AWMA Sinlge - \'Broadcast History\'','','inherit','closed','closed','','12991-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 14:32:33','2015-09-17 06:32:33','',12991,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12991-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12993,1,'2015-09-17 15:27:02','2015-09-17 07:27:02','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"203\" height=\"203\" /></a>We\'re very excited to present ‘<a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">Broadcast History</a>’, the first taste of the debut self-title EP from atmospheric rock trio <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA </a>The track prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a>, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\r\n\r\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\nStream the track at SoundCloud.\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223166722&amp;color=000000&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>','Debut AWMA Sinlge - \'Broadcast History\'','','inherit','closed','closed','','12991-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 15:27:02','2015-09-17 07:27:02','',12991,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12991-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12994,1,'2015-09-17 16:38:27','2015-09-17 08:38:27','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"203\" height=\"203\" /></a>We\'re very excited to present ‘<a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">Broadcast History</a>’, the first taste of the debut self-title EP from atmospheric rock trio <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA </a>The track prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a>, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\r\n\r\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n\'Broadcast History\' is available for streaming via <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">SoundCloud </a>now.\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223166722&amp;color=000000&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>','Debut AWMA Sinlge - \'Broadcast History\'','','inherit','closed','closed','','12991-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 16:38:27','2015-09-17 08:38:27','',12991,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12991-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12995,1,'2015-09-17 16:41:48','2015-09-17 08:41:48','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"203\" height=\"203\" /></a>We\'re very excited to present ‘<a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">Broadcast History</a>’, the first taste of the debut self-titled EP from atmospheric rock trio <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA. </a>The track prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a>, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\r\n\r\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n\'Broadcast History\' is available for streaming via <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">SoundCloud </a>now.\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223166722&amp;color=000000&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>','Debut AWMA Single - \'Broadcast History\'','','inherit','closed','closed','','12991-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 16:41:48','2015-09-17 08:41:48','',12991,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12991-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12996,1,'2015-09-17 16:42:57','2015-09-17 08:42:57','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"203\" height=\"203\" /></a>We\'re very excited to present ‘<a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">Broadcast History</a>’, the first taste of the debut self-titled EP from atmospheric rock trio <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA. </a>The track prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a>, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\n\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\n\n\'Broadcast History\' is available for streaming nowvia <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">SoundCloud </a>now.\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223166722&amp;color=000000&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>','Debut AWMA Single - \'Broadcast History\'','','inherit','closed','closed','','12991-autosave-v1','','','2015-09-17 16:42:57','2015-09-17 08:42:57','',12991,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12991-autosave-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(12997,1,'2015-09-17 16:43:06','2015-09-17 08:43:06','<a href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\"><img class=\"alignleft  wp-image-12932\" src=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AWMA-Bio-Photo-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"AWMA\" width=\"203\" height=\"203\" /></a>We\'re very excited to present ‘<a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">Broadcast History</a>’, the first taste of the debut self-titled EP from atmospheric rock trio <a title=\"AWMA\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/awma/\">AWMA. </a>The track prowls relentlessly around a circular guitar refrain, gradually building in intensity as Jason Lakis’s expansive guitar effects and Conor Devlin’s incantatory vocal colour the stereo field with portent. AWMA take the space, weight and atmosphere of their previous incarnation <a title=\"Half Film\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/half-film/\" target=\"_blank\">Half Film</a>, and inject instrumental details and a gentle shift in tempo from their slowcore origins.\r\n\r\nThe band dynamic that Conor and Eimer Devlin (<a title=\"[the] caseworker\" href=\"http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/the-caseworker/\" target=\"_blank\">[the] caseworker</a>) and Jason Lakis (The Red Thread, Mist and Mast) have cultivated over the years of touring and playing together has been elegantly renewed on their self-titled EP. This melodically charged music, akin to the early pastoral side of Pink Floyd, exudes intensity and emotional resonance.\r\n\r\n\'Broadcast History\' is available for streaming now via <a title=\"SoundCloud\" href=\"https://soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal/awma-broadcast-history\" target=\"_blank\">SoundCloud</a>.\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223166722&amp;color=000000&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=true&amp;show_comments=false&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>','Debut AWMA Single - \'Broadcast History\'','','inherit','closed','closed','','12991-revision-v1','','','2015-09-17 16:43:06','2015-09-17 08:43:06','',12991,'http://www.hiddenshoal.com/12991-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
