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| Terraplane in August 2004, by Rene Mente |
Recently added TERRAPLANE's "Into The Unknown" incl. bonus tracks and graphics, the lo-fi years compilation "Low Tide And Shockwave" with a new cover and extras, and also my early solo project SOULITUDE's "So came restless night" back to the Electric Magic Bandcamp collection. Feel free to check them out, donation always appreciated ... Thank you!
I will upload some demos, rare stuff, and hopefully interesting things from more than 20 years in music with Terraplane, Samsara Blues Experiment, Surya Kris Peters, and recently Fuzz Sagrado. If that's any interesting for you, feel free to follow: https://soundcloud.com/electricmagicarchives
I'm going to re-upload some of the historic SAMSARA BLUES EXPERIMENT - material, starting with the earliest documentation from a rehearsal which was the 3rd or 4th get-together with Florian Furtner on bass and Robin Niehoff on drums, and me for the 3rd (or 4th) time in my life on vocals - yet much worse than even the worst LDT-vox LOL - sorry I had to cut that out, but the rest is kinda nice and has a lot of that early 2000s vibe, when everything in "the scene" was still very underground, naive and pure. You may even spot the Tascam tape recorder in the middle of the room, which is kind of hilarious when you think that only ten years later this early necessity became a kind of fetish for some people (I have never sold sth quicker than my old tape recorder in 2017 LOL). Btw the song "Singata (Mystic Queen)" had already been written in our days with GREEN MONKEY (which was just a temporarily confusion in our days as TERRAPLANE - not sure why we decided to wear another name for some months), and to this day I guess this is the most popular song ... funny, right. Video btw was taken by Flo in Summer 2007, at our rehearsal room in a Christian community center in Wernigerode/Germany. I think we had one more rehearsal in that line up - which is kind of a shame but the move had already been decided for months - before I went to Berlin, where it took about one year to find the line up with Thomas and Richard, and later Hans. I will continue to write about the band history later ...
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| Creepy Chris at old Mac Oelke's "Kinderzimmer" ca. 2001 |
So I've recently turned 41, forty one, years of age, pretty ripe on life experience, and all I come up with is this silly old pic - for one just because maybe it's a good thing to reminisce on the long way I walked since there. Around the time this picture was taken, which is roughly twenty years ago, I just had decided to quit the first psychotherapy I went to, which I voluntarily began after a period of feeling kind of lost, indistinctly sad, maybe even depressed: I had also just quit my first studies because I couldn't handle the stress of studying informatics while for the first time moving quite far away from my home area (not as far as Brasil though), the band and friends I had just found after the more or less turbulent years of being a introvert teenager (I had my fair share of silly things ... like being a Graffiti sprayer and a 'stunt-skater'). Plus, the still very actual trauma of losing my mum at a young age. Yet all of this was a kind of a landmark in my biography, for the first time I had taken kind of brave decisions to better my life. Not nearly anything of it had worked out, yet these had been the first shy steps. On a side note; the day I quit therapy was September 11 2001 and we all know what was happening that day too, all TV-channels repeated pictures of the crashing twin towers even through my parents TV-set in the middle of nowhere Germany, and in a way this was also the end of naivety for many others around me.
I stopped watching TV about 11 years ago and even while occasionally checking on some of the news headlines out of little curiosity I really don't think that most of the sensationalism is something that anybody needs in his life. At least I for myself had realized early on that watching corporate news-channels or getting deeper into politics does not contribute anything positive to my life. For those who are curious about what's really going on in this world and it's many microcosms, I'd wholeheartedly recommend to watch Peter Santenello's channel and for more also check out his older blog entries (here). Oh and of course the dude took Ayahuasca LOL
These days I am kind of rediscovering almost everything that made up my rocking world in the early 2000s. Five Horse Johnson are very much one of these bands that would deserve a lot more attention. I mean look at that guitar player alone. I drew quite some influence from this when writing stuff for Terraplane's "Into The Unknown", if you want to compare this with songs like "Once I Was You" or "Lower" from that period. Anyways, Five Horse Johnson, awesome band ... for some reason never made it bigger than being an insider tip mostly within the "old dude Blues Rock-scene" ;) not really big for the stoner crowd. Kind of strange if you ask me, but maybe they've been a little too early with that sound.
Blogmaster JJ Koczan of THE OBELISK asked me for an interview, and even though I hesitated a bit - believe or not I am still insecure about speaking (english) in public - this was a request I couldn't turn down.
After all I enjoyed this talk, as it was also the very first time speaking in person, after knowing JJ from E-Mail and chat for more than ten years now. We talked about the new project, which probably will remain rather low key and of course had also to talk a good bit about SBE, why it had to end (or to be paused?) and the unavoidable nostalgia about the "legendary" US-tour etc.
Recently I have watched a lot of the other interviews JJ did, it's quite new to me to discover the mindsets of fellow musicians. I guess for most of my 20s and 30s I've been a little too busy on building up my own legend ;). Yet it was interesting to hear about LOWRIDER recording in a way the way I do now, including the use of amp simulations and synthesizers occasionally replacing bass. But anyway, one day after our interview my mind kept wandering, asking myself if probably I'd lifted too many "secrets" ...
By the way I am a bit clearer now about what the next FUZZ SAGRADO-release will be, and it may very well be a full album. I will select ca. ten songs that include a few SBE-like tunes, but also kind of a crossover between my SURYA-stuff and back-to-my-roots Rock. It may take a while though as I still have to write some lyrics and need to finish all these basic tracks that I already have. I'm a bit lazy these days and mostly enjoy just "noodling" along to my Spotify-playlists LOL.