Bernd Klug
Cold Commodities
Innova 902
Bernd Klug: double bass, electronics
01 a male
black wearing white, red and black stripes [08:43]
02 abandoned satellite dishes 1 [03:27]
03 What
Is This Thing Called Jazz [01:11]
04 spaces
within a 1-bedroom apartment [07:08]
05 suffering with mexican music [03:55]
06 Piezotrip [03:08]
07 durchschnittliches Surfverhalten [04:51]
08 all
the things I don’t know that my mother is [04:23]
09 abandoned satellite dishes 2 [01:07]
10 Rauschgespraech [04:37]
11 traces
within a 1-bedroom apartment [09:34]
12 proof
of extraordinary abilities [02:06]
TOTAL DURATION: [54:10]
On July
24th 2014 I accidentally erased my hard drive with the magnet of a
loudspeaker. There was no backup for any of the recorded work I had made since
moving from Vienna to New York in 2011. It was a huge relief for me to lose the
connection to my digital practice and identity.
That's one
side of the story. Another side is my solo double bass work from 2008 to 2013,
which focused on insecurity and
sadness as a natural and highly acoustic space. I wanted to see if the outcome
would be of any substance.
With these two
things in my mind, along with a growing interest in installation work, I
recorded this album. I was able to resolve the struggles around anxiety and my
playing the bass in the attempt to relate myself to the different situations of
my life. I invited all the abstract ghosts that surround us in the city into my
studio as collaborating guest artists (see booklet). The tracks on this recording are
improvisations over recurring themes, motives, states, and relations.
The artwork of
the booklet is a scan of a metal plate by the German artist Johanna Tiedtke and the layout is by the Italian media artist Gill
Arno, both dear colleagues at the MFA Program at Bard College. The final mixing
and mastering was with Martin Siewert. I am very
thankful to have collaborated with all these artists, and particularly grateful
to Barbara Ess for finally convincing me to release a
solo CD.
Wonderful
friends and musicians like Violetta Parisini, Sixtus Preiss, Mimu Merz,
Bernhard Hammer and David Schweighart have been
essential to the "erased" years of my recording practice. Thanks to
Brendan Landis, Katie Sabo, Arjun Kumar, Dani Neff, Jamie Kelly and Gust Burns for their more recent
encouragement. Unlimited thankfulness to Meaghan Burke, who
keeps all of that together, my father and my brother for everything and my mum
for everything else.
I am very
happy to release this CD with the wonderful team at Innova
and the American Composer Forum and very much appreciate the financial support
of the SKE/Austro Mechana, the Austrian Federal
Chancellery (Arts Division) as well as my hometown Villach.
- Bernd Klug
Annandale on
Hudson, July 2. 2014
This album is the product of
years of solo concerts and work in the studio, throughout which I was
developing ways of enabling the double bass / bass frequencies to ring freely
while designing specific scenarios to tell stories about the people and things
that surround me.
Besides multitrack
acoustic double bass, feedback double bass, or electric bass, each track
features a “guest artist”. These “artists” include sonifications
of a satellite dish, my recording device’s CPU, my wireless LAN router, an
impulse response space design (homemade reverb chambers of my apartment), a
conversation in front of my window, my neighbor’s Mexican music, my US Artist
Visa proposal (data conversion via a hex editor), local police transmissions,
and a cupreous donkey.
Recorded at East 19th Street, Brooklyn, US in
September 2013 by Bernd Klug.
Mixed & mastered by Martin Siewert and Bernd Klug at Motone
Sound Services, Vienna, AT in January 2014.
All tracks are played on a double bass except # 1
on an electric bass. No overdubs, cuts or effects used.
Bernd Klug, 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Innova
Director: Philip Blackburn
Manager: Chris Campbell
Publicist: Steve McPherson
Artwork: Johanna Tiedtke
Layout: Gill Arno
www.innova.mu
http://klug.klingt.org
Innova is
supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation.