Ines Birkhan + Bertram Dhellemmes' Ganz Ruhig EP on Smallforms

Last winter, with writer and performer Ines Birkhan, we performed and recorded a piece for guitar, electronics and spoken words at Smallforms in Vienna, that they later released on their label and that you can buy for a ridiculously small amount of money on Apple Music. The piece - Ganz Ruhig (very quiet) - is in German but if you don't understand (I don't), the musicality of it is plenty enough - and there is also an extra instrumental solo piece... 

This is advertisement but c'est la vie. 

Subensemble in Club-U, Vienna | 18 November 2017

Kybernetik 2. Ordnung
P. Hartwig + Overdub Hi / Subensemble / Maracatu / Hydroman 
Club-U, Karlsplatz Künstlerhauspassage 1010 Vienne
18 November 2017, 21:00

Subensemble in Rhiz, Konzert Klandestin #2 | 13 August 2017

https://konzertklandestin.wordpress.com

My music project with drummer Moritz Nolden turns into a real band - Subensemble - and we'll have our first concert under that name in famed music café Rhiz in Vienna on August 13th, in a double bill with noise band Royal Hungarian Noisemakers.

Dhellemmes/Reardon in Einstagsfestival, Zwettl | 17 June 2017

Einstagfestival
Blaugelbezwettl 
Propstei 1, 3910 Zwettl
17 June 2017, 20:30

Eastwood Sidejack Baritone & sitarized First Act Westerberg PW580

I got a First Act Westerberg signature guitar because its outline is brillant and it was very cheap, but to be honest the guitar was unplayable - neck too flat, terrible fretwork and very thin pickup. I had already change the pickup for a GFS P90, put an aluminium pickguard and a nut convertor to play slide but it was still accumulating dust, so I achieved its metamorphosis by putting a new neck and sitar saddles - the same I used for the Doppelcaster - and now I have a unique sitar guitar that I play regularly and hope will use on stage soon. It's still not perfect -  I have to adjust the alignment - but it works very well and  I will eventually upgrade the neck and the pickup again so it can be a reliable concert instrument...  

Next to it is the new Eastwood Sidejack Baritone guitar I got for my last birthday - I am very fond of my Danelectro Longhorn Baritone but its lipstick pickups have a narrow register, so I wanted to explore further the possibilities of baritones, and I'm not disappointed... I didn't like the white pickguard so I made a black one - first time I make one out of plastic, not as nice as metal but easier to do... Already used it for my last concert - photos and videos will come soon I hope.

 

 

Dirty Primitives strike again

A new song by my incredibly talented friends of Dirty Primitives, who seem to invent a new style of music every few months - this one would be Swamp Glam and I love it.

Dhellemmes / Reardon at V. Zajkert, September 2016.

This is a short excerpt from our concert at V. Zajkert, a radical music festival held in the Modem museum in Debrecen, Hungary, last September.

Dhellemmes / Reardon in Sound Pharmacy, Vienna

Free improvisation duo Dhellemmes / Reardon will perform for the Sound Pharmacy performance series on January 25th. 

The Sound Pharmacy is an interactive art-object-installation. Visually combining antique pharmacy interiors with sound-sculptures that interpret alchemist healing instruments and rituals. During the opening hours of the Sound Pharmacy the psycho-physical-pharmacists perform and create transcendent sound-potions to enhance frequency-noise-aromatic trans-states. 

For this 3 hours set, expect more electronics and soundscapes than in our usual sets, and inevitably new material, on top of intense piano/guitar creative duelling.

Sound Pharmacy

Schönbrunner Straße 6
1040 Wien
Wednesday 25 January, 19:00-22:00

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music of the week: lately I've spent some time watching and listening to San Francisco Bay Area YouTube channel PressureDrop.tv - enjoying pretty good guitar-based live music... Didn't listen to everything yet but so far I particularly enjoyed Purling Hiss and Summer Cannibals. 

concert pictures

Here are a few pictures of previous concerts:

This was shot a few weeks ago at the Small Forms sessions in Nadalokal in Vienna. Together with writer / performer Ines Birkhan, we recorded in the afternoon our mix of spoken words, half improvised hypnotic electronic music and noise guitar that will be released by Small Forms.

Then we performed it again in the evening - plus some more guitar + iPad free improv - for a small but enthusiastic audience...

More pictures here.

This one was in Debrecen in Hungary with Edward Reardon, performing at the Zajkert V festival last September. The concert was a little bit chaotic because after all the musicians spent the afternoon installing their instruments on the stage in the Modem (Debrecen's modern art museum)'s garden, and as the sound check was almost finished , a storm came and in a moment of panic we had to remove everything and stuff it in the museum's hallway!

We decided then to go on with the festival and reinstalled here and there - with the help of the supportive staffs of Modem and Zajkert... At the end was still good music and crazy atmosphere, Hungarian style, with an attentive audience. There are some reviews and pictures here and here - for those who speak Hungarian...

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Music of the week: Continuum, the 2014 gamelan-based concept album by Singaporean art rock band The Observatory. I need asian percussions for my next project!

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Music of the month: lately I bought some Miles Davis albums from his late 60s / early 70s electric era and I never have enough go his music... I was more familiar with his earlier and later work (I saw him on his Tutu tour some time back in the 20th century), but this phase is just fantastic - and you can find some full concert videos of the 1973 european tour on YouTube. And I really enjoy the music of Canadian band Suuns that combines beautifully synths and guitars, as much as pop and minimalism.

Dhellemmes + Birkhan at the Small Forms Sessions

Getting ready for coming Friday's Small Forms Sessions - we will be recording in the afternoon and performing in the evening. I will play (unless the project evolves some more) a first part with my iPad and two guitars, then writer / performer Ines Birkhan will join with spoken words, synth and drum machines... 

I started to use the iPad for concerts last month and I'm thrilled by the result - some sophisticated apps I use combine perfectly with the raw guitar sound I came up with recently - thanks to my new North Effects Ampeg Scrambler clone (I need to post something about my current pedal line...)

Dhellemmes / Reardon in Zajkert #5

Next week I will play my first concert ever in Hungary, together with pianist Edward Reardon -  we started this fruitful guitar / piano / electronics duo one year ago and it's a real pleasure to play to a new audience. 

Zajkert is an experimental music festival hosted by the Modem (centre for modern and contemporary arts) in Debrecen. The evening will end with a massive improvisation with all the musicians of the programme - I expect it to be grand!

Zajkert V, Modem
Baltazár Dezső tér 1.
4026 Debrecen, Hungary
17 September 2016 18:00

Musima Eterna ready for next concert

Last week I cleaned up my Musima Eterna, as I decided to finally use it for a music project - not just collecting... 

In October, I will be part of a recording/concert sessions going on in Vienna - I will tell more about it in due time - for which I want to equally use guitar, electronics and voice, and I was looking for a way to break my patterns - that's when the Eterna hanging on the wall blinked at me. With its extra fat neck and overwound pickups, it will be nothing like the super easily playable Jaguar or Epsilon I usually use.

Shortly after I bought it, the tremolo arm broke and there is no way I can replace it - and the substitute I tried didn't work - it's not a standard model. The electronics look strange to me - but I'm not a specialist -, still they work fine and need no change. The bridge and tremolo were heavily greased - super dirty but preserved from rust. So at the end it was mostly just cleaning and polishing, tightening screws, putting new strings and it's ready to rock again! I didn't bring it to the studio yet to play loud but I think that it will fit well to my current pedal combination - and that's a topic for a next post. 

(BTW, only after I bought this guitar, I found out that Kim Gordon used one when she recorded with Free Kitten, and I couldn't imagine a better predecessor...)

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Music of the month: started to work on a new project with guitar/baritone guitar, piano/synth and drums... Still trying to combine incompatible influences such as jazz fusion and batcave, minimal repetitive music and free improv! As we exchanged music to try to understand what we three have in common, we discovered than we all like The Dead Weather a lot, and decided to make a free instrumental cover of 'Treat Me Like Your Mother'... Otherwise my favorite guitar sound lately is  made by Reignwolf.

BTW, this is the 500th post on this blog...

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Still struggling with time to keep this blog active - I do manage to get projects done though - music, instruments, etc... - but posting here comes after the rest at the moment. It will get better.

Music of the now: Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs - my only folk album since Neil Young's Harvest 30 years ago... I can indulge in sweet melodies and harmonies sometimes...

Reaching for the cosmos

(picture used without permission, sorry)

2016 is definitely the worst year, and my blog will soon be more about dead musicians than about guitars... Alto saxophonist Marco Eneidi was not David Bowie or Prince, and his death will not make more headlines than his life or music... But those who knew him will remember him with fondness and gratitude. 

Marco passed away yesterday after a lifetime dedicated to uncompromising  art. Though he performed with the greatest free jazz musicians in the US and Europe, and released or played on numerous records since the mid-80s, his reluctance to please had him struggle for survival all his life, and keep on at the age when artists are either successful or gave up - until the very end. 

I met him when I moved to Vienna where he has been living since 2004 and where he organised the The Neu New York/Vienna Institute of Improvised Music - a weekly improv session where touring musicians would meet Viennese improvisers for a common practice of free music. After years of playing solo when I was in Berlin, that's where I learned again sharing and improving myself at he contact of fellow improvisers.

I never saw Marco on stage, I only heard him in the Celeste Jazzkeller club, never further than 3 meters from me. His saxophone sounded like thunder, it was like concentrating the energy and anger of 10 men into one column of air. All his music was about how mastering a technic could free your creativity, and it was a precious inspiration for any musician who would listen to him. Playing with him was truly uplifting, challenging but not intimidating for he was a generous man and artist. Sometimes at the end of a session he would go to the piano and hammer it with the same energy - and you found it also in the spontaneous poetry he was posting on Facebook...

Marco was living in Mexico since last year, as he was expelled from Austria for not regularising his administrative situation. It's not as bad as what Austria currently does with Syrian refugees, but it shows how stupid ideology and bureaucracy can be - and loose valuable people to a country. A few weeks ago he was touring Europe and came to play at the improv session in Celeste but I failed to go - too tired, busy with the baby... Huge mistake, I will never play with him or hear him live ever again.

Thank you for everything,  Marco.

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You might have noticed that my posting has been scarce in the last months, but I have a very good reason for that (I always have a good reason, have I not?): since last December I am the proud father of a baby girl (sleeping in my arms as I write these words) and my priorities have shifted. But I'm coming back slowly to my guitar-based activities - concerts, projects, design... More instrument-based projects actually, since my synth collection increased and I've been practicing with them more than with guitars - it's easier to play keyboards/MIDI interface with a baby on your lap (I'm an adept of attachment parenting, but it's another story...) 

Dancing on Ashes (Circle) in Pinacoteca

Tomorrow I will perform again a projected text + music show I created 5 years ago in Berlin - one of my few theremin based projects. It will also be the first Angel Meat performance in the last years...

This heap of pedals allows me to create a quadrophonic soundscape - just from the sound of the theremin (I couldn't use so many effects with a guitar, I had to make a performance for too many pedals!) The place is called Pinacoteca and is a small but very nice independent gallery in Vienna, with cheerful and supportive people.