headphonica (Curator)

There's more to this compilation than giving credit to our COMMODORE64 nostalgia, it is meant to show people who never owned a c64 or played it (or those who weren't even born in the late70s/early 80s)the sheer force that the featured c64 music had. Tim Follin,Ben Daglish,Mark Cooksey,Neil Brennan,Stephen Ruddy, Anthony Crowther,Martin Galway,Dave Lee,Rob Hubbard,Jason.S.Brooke,Peter Clarke,Jonathan Dunn,John Fitzpatrick,Chris Hülsbeck,Fred Gray and other c64 composers redefined the aural landscape of the 80s ,propelled the demo scene and thus helped democratize music on a global scale.This non-8bit tribute aims at acknowledging their greatness and the very tunes that became iconic.

OMG, Finally!

Ergo Phizmiz & Friends: "The Faust Cycle [FMA-Edition]"

This Release is all about to transgress boundaries:

- period of time [14 hours]

- perception [how?]

- filesize [1.5 GB]

After releasing "The Faust Cycle" at headphonica on January 1st we instantly started trying to upload the 5 chunks here because nearly all of Ergo Phizmiz' latest releases have been added to the FMA. All regular compression-rates down to 128kbps failed, maybe because of the tracklengths. The last attempt was to re-cut the 5 chunks into 12 portions each about 70 minutes, but even this failed in 320kbps, maybe because of the filesize, we don't know. And last but not least it appeared to be impossible to get all the portions into 1 album... hahaha!

Anyways here you are: The FMA-Edition of "The Faust Cycle"

The great advantages of this special Edition are mainly three:

1. it's right here on the FMA

2. it doesn't eat as much diskspace :)

3. it's easier to access the whole piece in smaller portions [even if this is maybe contradictory to the original intention of the piece]

So you could ask "Why should i download these 1.5 GB?" Well, there are many reasons, at least 46. Maybe you shouldn't miss how "Marcel Duchamp learns to rap" or the "walking grammophone". Maybe you'd like to know what happens to "an aroused monkey backstage in an opera house" and "a singing child psychatrist"...

Anyways, you should know that there's a beautiful hughe [DIN A3, 2sided] artwork from Moritz Gruenke from bueropluspunkt which you should download definately: Faust Cycle Artwork

If you'd like what you hear and think of writing a review about this piece you should consider that someone tried already.

In the end you might be a musician inspired by this work? Then go to Ergo Phizmiz' Blog http://ergophizmiz.blogspot.com/ and get the samples for remixing it.

However, you should first enjoy listeni!

mr&mrsBrian: Richest in Cream (Headphonica 007)

Review in the eartrip-magazine vol.4

Headphonica have released 8 albums, mostly EP-length, from ‘mr&mrsBrian’, about whom no little information is forthcoming, apart from the fact that their real names are Sven Hendrik Steffens and Lasse Kanitz. Their output is pretty diverse, from the slowed-down vocals, bursts of noise, and touches of manic exploitation-
soundtrack-fake-organ-jazz on ‘the disgusting organic theme or the proliferation of incarnation’, to the sludge-rock of ‘Y/Shmart’, but centres mainly around the ‘impersonality’ of beats and electronic sounds.

Headphonica 007, ‘Richest in Cream’, is a series of warped sexual pop songs, traversing a number of styles as seems to be customary with this project, its sound-scapes dominated most of all by deliberately artificial-sounding keyboards. Perhaps its finest moment is the second track, ‘foyer d’amour’, whose nicely-constructed, catchy musical structure bolsters up the deadpan spoken-word delivery, the sound of someone ushering a customer into a brothel. (Given that there’s no one else in the ‘space’ for the man to be addressing, it would seem that the customer is the listener, searching for his cheap sonic thrills from his position of safety and power.) The voice continues, offering the customer limitless food, drink and sex; to get on in this world, “all that you need is your penis and cash.” Such promises are delivered with the dry politeness of a butler or a porter, though touches of a sardonic sing-song humour show through the blandness, eventually exploding into the laughter of multiple voices 17that plays out over the last third of the tune – simultaneously the delighted sound of the customer in his paid-for paradise and the brothel bosses counting their cash. It’s a hollow and horrible hilarity, somewhat akin to the mocking despair ushered in by the laughter on Gorrilaz’ ‘Feel Good, Inc.’, and with none of the dreamy flights of fancy which that song offers as a contrast to the bleakness. The laughter ends, leaving one
voice to fill out the final few seconds –a female one, the first time a woman is allowed a voice of her own, to be more than the object of shop-window talk (“we’ve got brown, blonde or foxy ladies – take two of them, lay in between, and cover them with your loving cream”) a voice suggesting at once an orgasm and the sounds of tearful
desperation, the briefest glimpse, beneath the ‘groovy’ exterior, of those who suffer – who always suffer – for the sake of the white, western man and his pursuit of endless pleasures.

The rhymes in ‘foyer d’amour’ are childish and scatological – “but listen there’s one important order to you: no children, no pets, no wounds and no poo” – yet at the same time, they’re an important part of the way the track’s jokey mask shows through the real terrors underneath. As the “important order” indicates, the brothel is
carefully regulated (though not, it would seem, to the benefit of those who provide its ‘services’), as full of petty rules as any other institution– rules which offer comfort, which allow the customer to feel safe at the same time as ‘letting go’, pushing out imaginary limits and breaking the arid routines of normality while never straying off
the demarcated path down which they’re really being lead. William Blake would have it that “Brothels are built with bricks of religion”; in this case, the brothel seems more like some kind of adults-only holiday resort where flesh is brought and sold as any other commodity – a happy-clappy place where desires are manufactured, sold, and ‘fulfilled’.
One might say that the impersonality on ‘Richest in Cream’ is that of human beings, blindly following their way through a world of pleasures which are ever- present (for a price), switching on the TV and watching blue movies, indulging in endless fantasies while masturbating on the hotel (or brothel) bed. Humans are reduced to their most basic levels, mechanically repeating actions which they pretend make them feel better but which only conceal an ever-widening void within and without, and which most often can only occur given the suffering, direct or indirect, of someone else.

by DM Grundy