Con-struct

• Track Listing

Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011), composer and concept artist, was one of the most important representatives of Germany's electronic music avant-garde. A student of Joseph Beuys, he founded Berlin's legendary Zodiak Free Arts Lab, a subculture club in 1967/68, was a member of Tangerine Dream (with Klaus Schulze and Edgar Froese) and Kluster (with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius) and also released countless solo albums. Schneider TM (Dirk Dresselhaus) has been involved in various musical fields since the late 1980s. Between 1989 and 1997 he played and sang in bands like Locust Fudge and Hip Young Things, before focusing more on electronic music from 1997 onwards, starting up his Schneider TM project. In 1999, Dresselhaus formed the duo Angel with Ilpo Väisänen. The Con-Struct series features Schnitzler's daily excursions through the sonic diversity of his synthesizers. He preserved these exceptional sounds for use in combination with each other in subsequent live performances, amassing a vast sound archive of his discoveries over time. When Jens Strüver, the producer of the Con-Struct series, was granted access to this audio library at the outset of the 2010 decade, he came up with the idea of constructing new compositions, not remixes, from the archived material. On completion of the first Con-Struct album, he decided to develop the concept into a series, with different electronic musicians invited into Schnitzler's unique world of sound. Schneider TM on his involvement: "I am very happy and honored to be invited to do an album for the Con-Struct series and wanted to do something special and genuine in this posthumous collaboration with Conrad Schnitzler. I wanted to get as close to his spirit as possible, so I created a musical situation as if we were actually collaborating together in the same room, with Conrad playing his pre-recorded sound-files or modular system and me dubbing and processing it live on the fly - almost as if it was a live-concert situation. Next to many other aspects of Schnitzler's vast oeuvre, I am fond of the noisy, poly-harmonic, poly-rhythmic and sometimes quite humorous minimalism of his music, as well as his way of using chance, which often leads to magical and raw beauty. There are no other sounds on this record except for ones created by Schnitzler, sent through my system and processed live. During the sessions I had the feeling of being in a conversation with him."