I am sitting in the garden. The sun is shining. A fresh wind around me. It’s rustling from the forest. The birds give concerts. The bugs crawl. The ants are working. The bumblebees growl. The dogs are dozing. The buds of the plants jump up.
It turns green and then colorful. I am sitting in the garden.
Exactly 25 years ago, I spent six wonderful weeks in Australia. “Thinking About Myself” was released there, in (Western) Europe and England at the same time followed by the US-release in July.
I try to imagine how I imagined my life in 25 years 25 years ago … I come to the conclusion that during this time I probably did not waste any thought about the future. The future might be enough for the already booked trips and concerts into the next year, to new musical ideas, which I wanted to tackle in the studio at once and some important things in the private or family area – but beyond?
1994 was an incredibly dense, intense year. On the thermals of the euphoric techno-first years and in the cockpit of the ultralight “Stellar Supreme” I sailed higher and higher in the sky of a time that seemed like a customizable utopia. The radiant “child” developed into a maturing “boy”.
Traveling to all imaginable countries, the time I took, intensely inhaling and exhaling the new impressions, the encounters, the emerging friendships over the world made possible all by the concerts, which took place under partly unbelievable enthusiasm, enabled me to expand my horizon of experience.
Living in New York, Aug 94
1994, I also see the year in which idealism, enthusiasm and creativity on the one hand, with identification, professionalization and media charisma on the other hand, reached an ideal synthesis peak: “Techno worldwide” had become big enough to be taken seriously intellectually and at the same time to define a “confession”; but it was still far from mutating into a heterogeneous-arbitrary mass phenomenon.
In 1994 I was convinced: Et hoc erit nobis signum vincere.
Thanks to my move to Logic Records in person Matthias Martinsohn, Konrad von Löhneysen and Wendy K, New York became my second center of life next to Berlin. Over the next few years, JFK Airport was something of the same for me as the S-Bahn station Friedrichstrasse or the subway station Görlitzer Park: the Lufthansa flight attendants and I coordinated our joint flight or duty schedules – from today’s perspective, I covered in from 1992 to 1999 my personal CO2 account by a factor of 10,000 – to ten times the lifetime.
That was a rush. An intoxication that took on ever more outrageous forms, whose light as well as shady sides had to be musically processed.
“Thinking about myself” took on this task. The fact that after the negotiations with the major record companies it was also about their great expectations regarding commercial success, continued to play a surprisingly subordinate role in my mind: I knew what I wanted, I knew what I was with the absolutely self-disassociating self-awareness equipped that it is so and not otherwise correct.
I remember: as a “techno hero” with the potential to become an international (techno) pop star, all record labels were interested in being able to sign me up. My essential conditions, which were fulfilled – even though teeth-chewing – were:
- a) The record company gets the finished mastertape only after the contract has been signed and will be published in such a way and not otherwise.
- b) To ensure full artistic freedom, the record company has no longer-term options on later albums. (“One Off Deal”).
- c) I did not want to have an advance, but full say or veto for all the marketing issues.
March 1994 by Kramer & Giogoli
Already in spring 1993 I started with the first ideas, some of which soon became coherent compositions (“Treptow”, “Loops of Infinity”, “Tao 2000”, “Au dessous des Nuages”). Many elements of the album were created during the concert tours on location (“Brooklyn”, “Cosmic greets Florida”, “Another Day in Another City”). In September 1993, the work was then completed after a one-month studio stay with Jens Woynar, where, for example, “Fantasia” (after many preliminary series in the months before) was created in one magical night in the studio. The refinement to what it is, happened again by the gifted sound engineer and friend Wolfgang Ragwitz at the mastering.
From the beginning, it was clear that a reasonably adequate approach to the subject matter set a further extension of the boundaries in which techno music (in all its varieties) was generated in a liberating, revolutionary, playful, but sometimes quite self-referential way.
What I especially like in the retrospective on “Thinking About Myself”: that I wanted to go on and on my way: continue to explore the limits, shift the horizons, continue to let the great musical-historical fundus play with its own cosmos.
That I wanted to develop and tell others with enthusiasm and curiosity about the (open) experiment.
That I was overwhelmingly happy to share all this with people, without fear, without calculation.
To be pleased with what has been created in all corners of the world of fantastic music in the present and in the spirit of techno without being determined by it in my own sound ideas (in the sense of “serving expectations”).
“Thinking about Myself”-Record Release Party @ “The Bank” (Former Studio of Jasper Johns)
The liner notes include: “Listening, you’ll quickly realize that the piano has played a major role in the new compositions. Why? I believe it is the intuitive longing to combine my childhood and my associated discovery of classical music with my presence as an electronic musician.”
At that time, I had no idea where my life would go along with my musical path.
Life is a big miracle.
It cannot be imagined which different directions it could have taken and who I would become …
The course of events depends on an infinite number of – unpredictable – things; always in the mutually feedback tying between own decisions and the not personally influenceable dynamics of the outside world.
“Autumn in Berlin” is perhaps the most impressive example of what I mean: it tells of who I was back then and it tells about who I am today.
It’s timeless and that’s why it tells of the times.
“Autumn in Berlin” seems to me today like a bridge, a premonition, an intuitive inner compass, a small star in the night sky.
“Herbst in Berlin”, Score for Solo-Piano (edited by Marco Maria)