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| I even did the impossible: Cut my hair ... Berlin-Weissensee, 2016 |
There are two previous SBE albums, but today I feel like writing about another topic: the influences on my Surya Kris Peters project. It was November 2013, when SBE were on a long tour through most of Western and Northern Europe. We'd been on the road for a whole month, from Berlin to Scandinavia to the Benelux countries, France, Spain and Portugal and back again - a hell of a ride. In between I got really sick, food poisoning in the middle of Spain where nobody spoke English, you couldn't even talk to the sound engineers or bands on site.
In addition, I was quite annoyed by a strange problem that was to haunt me even until the end of the band: SBE was always super loud! In the quartet lineup though it became increasingly difficult to make out my own guitar's sound on stage. Everything was crazy loud, and that's not always cool. You also have to remember that some of the clubs we played weren't that big back then, and there was a lot of noise coming out of the amps every night. I tried using a booster pedal to get my solos through, but in the end it seemed all a bit over the top.
When we got back home after the tour, months of time-out and discussions followed. Our bassist Richard also wanted to try other things in his life, following his profession as a sound engineer, and eventually decided to leave the band. We didn't rehearse for months, and in one of our conversations I vaguely let slip through that I was longing for something else in music. That idea was very indistinct. What I actually wanted, I didn't really know myself yet. But at some point during that time, I also started getting more involved with synthesizers.
I bought my Moog Little Phatty shortly after recording the Long Distance Trip-album in 2010, but for the first few years I played just with the presets and had little idea of anything. After I got into it a bit more, modular Eurorack synthesizers became of bigger interest in 2015. All that stuff was incredibly fascinating for me, a different world! I had zero idea about it and always wondered where exactly the sounds came out and how it worked with all the cables. In the beginning, everything seemed very complicated, which I can only smile about today.
But also the music I listened to in private changed a lot. While until then classic and obscure heavy rock of the 1970s was on my agenda, that somehow wore out more and more when I had discovered almost all underground bands of that era and also suddenly felt as if every other long-haired musician outed himself as a big Black Sabbath or Pentagram-fan. Oh okay, ... I was a bit tired of the always same sound of distorted blues-influenced guitar, bass and drums, so I slowly started to explore other sounds.
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| I put a lot of effort in these special screen-printed versions of "The Hermit" and "Holy Holy Holy". |
In 2014 and '15 I became a little obsessed with the soul divas of the late 60s and early 70s, Margie Joseph, Ann Peebles, Inez Foxx, etc. Of course, that had very little to do with my own music, let alone me wanting to play that music at all, but something about it fascinated me and held a certain appeal for a long time. Well, I like female voices, and probably can't help it ;) It probably made for a kind of balance to all the heavy stoner and hard rock bands I was exposed to all the time.
I had also tried Krautrock from time to time, but it didn't really work until today. There were a lot of good ideas, but a lot of it seemed at the same time kinda "immature" and sometimes almost a bit amateurish. Well, it's a wide and almost unoverseeable field, but if you look closely for a while, you can of course find some outstanding gems like Manuel Goettsching/Ashra, early Popol Vuh, and for me also the jazzy groups like Missus Beastly in particular.
I also got into more and more "Space Age" film music of the 60s and 70s, and the already mentioned KPM Library Recordings from an earlier post here. What wonderful music once had been made! In a way, that vibe has been with me for a long time, not that I ever tried to imitate it, but I think my Surya project has taken a lot of it as an influence, although it has appealed to rather few people among my fans so far - very different from "Guitar Chris".
However, many of of my Surya tracks and albums have brought me a great, maybe greater satisfaction than the studio albums with SBE, some of which I can't even listen to, out of dissatisfaction, or it is also simply overheard, while in my solo project I can implement so much more spontaneous ideas, while also not having to impress anyone with it, it's all a real fun project - which will also soon find its continuation with a new album!
I almost forgot to mention that from my childhood I was fascinated by the music and image of Mike Oldfield (there's this one picture of him sitting in this old mansion with all his instruments that has been burned into my memory since I was a boy), and Isao Tomita's "Pictures At An Exhibition" from my father's LP-collection. The very early Surya stuff was also influenced by Asian sounds, like Osamu Kitajima, some of Flower Travellin' Band and sounds like that.
