Carsten Olbrich
I must have first been in contact with Carsten Olbrich in the very late 80s or early 90s. He was already running strong with his own music and his Ebu’s Music label. His own music was varied and he had a lot of different projects, from electronic to punk. His label would release similar variety as well. Robin and I were delighted to meet Carsten and stay at his Frankfurt home and even record some music with him. He was and is a charming fellow and very important underground resource.
Above, his electronic release with M. Nomized ( from France) and Mr. Moto ( Matthias Lang from Germany).
Well, I as a spiritual thinking and feeling man know that I learned my synesthesia in a kind of non-material dimension, where music and expression are much more intelligent and in a greater and easier complexity to realize (like if you are inside of a three-dimensional videoclip for example). This is my main influence.
However, here on earth I had to use a cheap cassette-recorder in the late 70 ‘s which I switched a bit too loud during a test-recording: A weird feedback-sound came on this tape, which suggested me that this could be the beginning of an own release.
A few years later I got in touch with a tape by Harald Sack Ziegler called “Hoerbares Aufstossen” on which you could hear only burps, which was quite fun :-)
A further few years later I got in touch with Frank Milautzcki, who is now a really great poet, and who ran to that time an underground mailorder with such bands like “Die Welttraumforscher”, “Dajat Inya” or “City Of Worms”.
With their paintings, stories and illustrations I discovered a real
alternative music-scene, much more alternative than Punk, Wave, Independent and later LoFi or Gothic with their “usual” commercial ways of marketing and distribution. The listener of this “Real Underground” had not to react to impulses which were given from outside. the listener had to discover the
personality of individualists and the images, arts, works they created.
I believe, that this different kind of taking notice is much more natural. That’s why I felt good with it and why also I wanted to take part (even if I didn’t know, that I was quite late in the late 80’s).
And so I took part, with my label www.ebusmusic.com and with own releases from Wild Roses, Always Welcome, Schmertz der Welten, Mr. Ebu, Herr Ebu andwith my bands Top Of Pyramid, Die Traktor and die Hacke Peters. We released on tape, CD, vinyl, CDr and again tape. I traded and collected around 1500 tapes from other musicians (and digitalized them all – even if I’m only 40 years old now).
I think, internet spreads the Do It Yourself idea much better than we all together did it through our own music-scene in our past times. And: Some few and new tape-labels are still existing. http://www.aldi-punk.de.vu for example. So Don, why don’t you spread the word from today – we’re now in the new decade 2010 and a new, maybe small tape-generation is growing…!!