Sea Wanton
Active since the earliest days of underground music, Sea Wanton as Non Toxique Lost, from Berlin, produced solo tapes and appeared on many compilations. I believe the tape above is from 1981-2. Below, the cover for his cassette, “Wladiwostok” , a live tape from 1984.
I’ll start with the present time. Will dive into the past.
Eric Duboys is a french writer and is writing his third book about “Industrial Music For Industrial People”. In that book you’ll read some details about the band, ‘Non Toxique Lost’, where I do the vocals(Achim Wollscheid played and plays guitar, and Steffen Schütze played the violin then, now takes care of his laptop).
Molto Menz nowadays is in charge of a video-distribution company in Berlin and has succeeded in establishing a contact between myself and a well known German book publisher. Could therefore be, that there will be more available on ‘Non Toxique Lost’ in book format in the near future. Around ’82, Molto ran a distribution shop for cassettes, which was sometimes called “DU BIST SO GUT ZU MIR” (which translates to: “You are so good to me”) but sometimes called “CASSETTEN & ZEITVERTREIB” (which translates to: “Cassettes and pastime”). There were all types of music, punk-rock, avantgarde, jazz, poetry, agitation, etc. on the media “Cassette”. From 5 to 60 minutes. C-5, C-10, C-20, C-30, sometimes C-60, too. Rarely bootlegs, mostly original recordings. Moreover, we had given our cassette production as a licence to so-called “cassette-labels” like MUSIC FOR MIDGETS (GB), STAALPLAAT (NL), VITA NOVA (F) and CALYPSO NOW ! (CH). For a short time, we had some busy trade of cassettes with those producers / labels like GRAF HAUFEN TAPES (Berlin), CASSETTENKOMBINAT (BERLIN), SELEKTION (Frankfurt) and, of course, the “standard” trade with other musicians. The cassette had been the perfect media to protect our independence from the established structures of the music business. But the lack of multiplicators increased…hardly any reviews in the magazines, no broadcastings, lack of interest of the (record) buyers (for this media). But we continued to use the cassette to apply for performances (like the “Atonal 2 Festival, Berlin 1983”)…We participated in some international projects (like ARTAMAN TAPES, ADN, NECRONOMICON, CTHULHU RECORDS, etc.). The production / distribution of our cassettes lost its significance. To cut the story short: I copied 4 songs from my cassette recorder on the 2-channel “reel-to-reel” machine of Ralf Wehowsky (from P16.D4 and SELEKTION). We sent the master to the (vinyl) printing company and thus, the LP “Wanton” came to the world. This LP was re-released by Walter Robotka (from KLANGGALERIE, Vienna) once again as a CD…All songs are verbatim copies of the songs from the original cassettes.
