October 2008. I am still digging in my past, transferring old DAT tapes to my computer. This makes me quite melancholic at times, but also shows that there is a development here, and some musical skills obviously improved. And I come across a lot of music I had long forgotten.

On one of those tapes I found the track Fragment Endlos, and I immediately remembered when it was made and under which circumstances. This is a very personal piece for me, created in a time where I felt quite dark and lived in an appropriate environment. I just had moved from West-Berlin, Neukölln, to the east, to Prenzlauer Berg, which at that time was not the expensive post-hippster neighborhood it is now, but the very opposite. I lived in a small place on the ground floor in a backyard, with a coal oven and a toilet outside the building... It was the end of winter, cold, unfriendly, and very dark. Pretty much like on the pictures above.

The note on the DAT tape lists these instruments: Notator 3.1 (sequencer software), M-160 (Roland 16 channel mixer), Quadraverb (legendary low-budget reverb), TG-77, SY-77. (Yamaha FM synthesizers)

Musically this is influenced by 'The Pearl' (Brian Eno, Harold Budd). Sound design wise it shows that I just go the TG-77 and SY-77, and then there is this one long brass-like sound that I made as a result of listening to John Chowning.

For the free track of the month version I slightly edited the original 45 minute version and added field recordings of Bahnhof Zoo and the S-Bahn here in Berlin which I also captured in 1992.

robert_henke_fragment_endlos_1992.mp3
[ ~ 30minutes, 50MByte ]

Enjoy the music