A posthumous duo LP featuring text and music by Conrad Schnitzler, music by Wolfgang Seidel, and artwork by Matt Howarth.
Conrad Schnitzler and Wolfgang Seidel have been musical collaborators since the early 1970s when Seidel performed in Schnitzler's free-form group Eruption that had been founded as a successor to Kluster and featured a revolving cast of members. In the 1980s, they produced the duo albums Consequenz, Consequenz II and Con 3 where Seidel performed under his alias Wolf Sequenza.
Shortly before Schnitzler's death in 2011, he handed Seidel a hard disk of his archive including a huge collection of music originally recorded to CD-R, subdivided into "solos" and "mixes", where solos are building blocks to be blended with other solos in a performance, and mixes are recordings of such performances. One of those solos turned out to be a spoken-word CD-R, aptly titled "CONtext", where Schnitzler gives an account of his musical philosophy – in a performative lecture with a lot of humour. It is not known what he intended this recording for, but its unique character made it a natural choice for a building block of a new piece.
Instead of making a collage with other solos from Schnitzler's archive, Seidel decided to record his own music to accompany the text, inspired by the early-1970s Eruption recordings. The resulting 8-channel piece was mixed down to stereo for side A of this LP and features Schnitzler's voice and English text-to-speech subtitles for his non-German-speaking fans. Side B contains an instrumental posthumous duo for which Seidel used excerpts from Schnitzler's EMS synthesizer performance at the Gallery House in London in 1972.
The cover artwork was created by US comic artist Matt Howarth and features Con, a character from his Savage Henry comic book series who is a "German synthethist" and member of the premiere insect-rock group, the Bulldaggers.
"Any combination of sounds is just as valid as any other. Any means for the production of a group of sounds is just as valid as any other means. [...] Music is not what reaches our ear as a sound wave. It's not the sounds that are music, but what we've made out of them and what has been heard from them." (Conrad Schnitzler)
Edition of 300 with printed inner sleeve and insert containing a transcript of side A and liner notes.
Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011) was a German musician, a major figure in the European experimental and electronic music scene since the late 1960s.
