Oh yes. Finally done, uploaded, online: The official music video for grump.
The reason it took me so long to publish the video is that i wanted to share some of the tools that i programmed (or refurbished) for the video along with it – which i did today:
A new “software” tab on the top of the page with hopefully useful stuff for, eh, jitter nerds.

Technically i am just reusing some of the material that Georg shot for the gloom video, passing it through a mesh generation patch that uses flowfield techniques and fooling around with videofeedbacks. So technically it was quite simple. Practically it was a lot of work, but hey, i still have a few years to go, so i need to fill up my time anyway.

Enjoy, share, and tell me what you think.

[back from india i am in the process of properly chewing, swallowing and digesting my amazement, so it will eventually come out as wisdom at the other end. and since i trust my subconscious mind to do this while i sleep, i had time to browse through my bucket-o-fragments, where i found this algorithmic text - actually on my birthday. fitting, funny, and if it does not make sense to you, i'll explain how it came to be below]

—————————————–—
me, sitting at the beach with with:
me fear
me wisdom
me love
me loony
and me sleeping youth
——————————————–

‘oh dear,’ said the fear , ‘youth had died away, ‘reshaped to nothingness by a string of accidents too long to be any lesson to me.’

‘surprise ?’, asked a little sharp bark just beside my head impatiently, ‘fear should know that knowledge can be ignorant.’

i hesitated for some time without interrupting.

‘though i must indeed confess that our circle became smaller.’ , the wisdom continued, not awaiting any answer. ‘but the ideals of consummate loveliness and wisdom are to come out to reconsider the regulations of non – existence’

‘.. to reconsider the regulations of non – existence’, echoed the love, her eyes getting thin,
‘ you can love, love generates will, generate will, you exist’

‘remember the simple rules birth had taught you’, the loony interrupted in a moment that it thought to be wise, ‘grant me harmony, dream up futures, those weren’t fantasies, we do not understand what space means.’

‘in the hope of enlightening your ignorance’,  youth was awakening and throwing in the next wisdom, ‘it said: grant me futures, dream up harmony, and if we do not understand what space means, we still have fantasies’

splash ! he was such a dear little puppy it was always irritating hearing his grave voice. but his restrictions and regulations tend to form a beautiful harmonious something, and wandering among those i was always surprised to note vivacity and cheerfulness, so i nodded.

‘restrictions and regulations may be accepted as a compass in most states’, wisdom was reading my thoughts, ‘but who is the court, and who are the jurymen ?’

‘the most blind and benighted ones’, i abused the opportunity for letting my thoughts escape. there were some attempts at applause, but then a chilling cry drilled through my brain:

‘- – oh dear ! ‘ , the fear screaming blue murder, ‘ you carry your affected simplicity too far’

‘that is how i came here’, i let fall the forbidden terms.

———————————–

Most of my lyrics and attempts at poetry are in some way or the other drawn from input texts, either via cutup techniques or via algorithmic collages based on statistical analysis. In this case the basis was a simple markov chain of words that i built by analyzing and mixing two complete books: Lewis Carroll’s “Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland” and Edwin A. Abbot’s “Flatland:  A Romance of Many Dimensions”. The process is simple yet wonderful: First i build a dictionary of words that i find in those books, then i count the words (first level: how often does a specific word occur in those books), and then i look how high the chance is that a specific word occurs _after_ each other word. Continue as you like, but three levels are usually enough. Then i build a random text that reflects those statistical tables: Start with any word, choose the next word by looking in the table which words are actually possible (and by which chance), choose the next word by looking what words can come after those two, and so on. Let the algorithm run until it stops due to lack of further possibilities or until you have enough nonsense collected, sit and read, collect the pearls, sort and rearrange, and let your creation make you happy.

I truly hope i have managed to embed an earworm deep into your musical brain, if not, let me try again: “I´m leeeaving on a jetplane..”

You are welcome.

I´ll be in India the next couple of weeks, but don´t you worry: You can still head over to the hons-shop and buy buy buy, the CD delivery is being taken care of even while i am gone. (A big Thank You to Claudia).

In the meantime: Enjoy the music, have a nice xmas and newyear, spread happiness.

Yours truly, hons

After an exhausting 2 month period of doing-other-things-than-music, i finally had a good night sleep and enabled the shop at hons.bandcamp.com just minutes ago.
Immediately afterwards my head turned into a void and i cannot remember any of the clever things that i wanted to tell the world, but:

This is what i have been working on for the last year – this is a release!

Not only can you, my dearest fans and friendlings, buy the complete album in any digital format that you could possibly desire, or as a physical CD (though i only had a handful printed – you´d better be quick), you can also listen to the complete album here on my page, on bandcamp and on facebook. That´s 14 tracks, 50 minutes. That´s wonderful.

There are a few things that i have learned on the way. And since i like writing lists, here we go:

1) Your hopes will be tested.
My hopes are usually high (as are my fears), and the road i chose to get the album out was quite a ride. Every second step i took felt like a rock breaking away beneath me, the latest glitch being that i trusted the company that sold the CD envelopes to sell the right thing, only to find out that with this envelopes the mailing costs are enormous.

2) Everything will be ok in the end  - If it´s not ok, it´s not the end.
Ha! I knew it. Going to repackage the CD´s this afternoon.

3) Eat healthy food, thus two sheets of toilet paper will suffice.
This may sound a bit off topic, but it is my way of saying „Take care of yourself and less shit will happen“.

4)  If your head is a void and you cannot remember any of the clever things you wanted to say, you can always fall back to calender-motto style wisdoms, just as i did.

Thank you,
humbly,
hons

A lot of things happened since my last post, and a fair amount of these things can clearly be categorized as “huge successes for a little man”.

Most importantly: The CD´s are here – and as a release date i have finally set 20.11.2011, cause it is a beautiful number, and 11.11.11 has already passed.

To celebrate this major milestone, Georg uploaded his musicvideo for gloom, ta-dah:

I am as happy as a hons can be,
Yours truly,
The King of Gloom

Notes to myself:

The idea behind trying to publish an album was also to create a test bed for my slowly awakening social skills. Show the world what I do, and see if I can handle the feedback. This will require some changes on my side.

The thing with change is that it might hurt a bit, but avoiding change usually hurts much longer.

In short (To extract some wisdom from what I have recently smiled about on the ted forums):

Change is inevitable. Change brings pain. Pain can catalyze growth, and personal growth brings wisdom. Wisdom brings open-mindedness, open-mindedness brings empathy, and empathy connects us. Connection brings happiness.

Possible Conclusion: Todays Sunday afternoon misery might easily be connected to the fact that I am somewhat paralyzed by the amount of steps still required to finalize the publishing process (At least five more steps, oh my). And thus deferring change, and thus avoiding happiness.

Possible Solution: Choose the simplest task, make a step. It will hurt just a little bit.

Answer: Aye Aye Captain hons. Made the CD-Cover:

PS.: You may have seen the front cover already, it is the picture that Wiltrud Derschmidt has taken. The inside and back are fresh and new. Big thanks to Andreas Platzer who helped me with the final touches and color correctiones for the printing.

So i am buried beneath a heap of work/dayjob related challenges, nothing massively spectacular but everything at once, as it quite regularly happens in my line of work. Lots of short movies to edit, interfaces to program, lions to tame [did you know that OS X Lion does not turn on your vga monitor if no digital monitor is attached? Me neither, and nor did apple support. For a blank screen i would not have needed a computer at all].

But necessities is still alive, quite so, and for relaxation purposes i devoted my sparetime to grump. i have decided that i could easily squeeze a second video out of the material that georg recorded for gloom, with a different visual approach. so i refurbished some of my jitter-patches, mostly line graphics and video feedbacks, going for a cloudy and drifting look that quite neatly fits the “make-elephants-tap-dance”-approach of grump.

I think i have again managed to land on the dark side, but it seems that my tiny pearls of happiness are shining brighter against a dark background.

 “Hons single-handedly redefines electroacoustic music using an academic approach that is unique and refreshing…”

“.. a combination of Bowie and Roger Waters, as if they were splashing waves in the pool together, telling each other dirty jokes…”

“.. an audio excavator, plunging deeper into the harmonic regions of darkness in order to extract the hope and sensitivity buried far beneath the surface..”

While I cannot truly believe the “single-handedly redefines” part, I have to confess that these are the kind of comments that make up a happy hons. So where do they come from ?
In my search for an easy way to pimp up my PR Kit, I stumbled over ReviewYou, a service from Ariel Publicity. It´s basically a team of music journalists offering their writing skills to the unknown artist craving for feedback – the UACFFs, a group that I can fullheartedly relate to.

And it´s cheaper than therapy.

The process is simple: Order your reviews (currently 45 $ for a whole album, there are other packages to choose from), upload your music, get assigned to matching writers and wait for your reviews to drop into your mailbox.

Was it worth it ? Yes it was. From the three reviews I ordered I got quite a sense of how “necessities” could be described, the reviews where euphoric enough to boost my ego and rigorous enough for me to be able to accept it, I actually learned a few things – and a possible two sentence description emerges:

“Hons is a Vienna-based electroacoustic musician with a knack for experimental sounds and gritty, trip-hop grooves. His latest full length album necessities both brims with industrial sounds and creepy psychedelic rants and encompasses all of the elements of a great down-tempo/trip-hop album that shines in a very dark way.”

Nice, isn´t it. I already shiver with anticipation.

If you have too much time on your hand you can read the whole reviews below, and don´t forget to share, you can even comment to make an UACFF happy.

Continue reading →

One of the things that still startles me about my approach to making music is the fact that I completly lack the words to describe what I am doing.  “Oh, you are making music. That´s interesting, what kind of music do you make?” – “Eh, ahm. You know, it´s, ahm. I think it´s not for everyone.” – Head falling silent, ego falls apart.

So I set out to find out.

My first approach – and that´s the one I am writing about today – was to set up a “Jango Focus Group” to find out what genres I might fall into and which bands might sound similar. While this is actually not very important for me as an artist (to use words that are friendlier than “completely irrelevant”), it is very important during the process of finding listeners, also called: The Press Kit.

The Jango Focus Group was originally suggested by Brian Hazard from Passive Promotion, and I thought it to be wise. The idea is simple: Jango, an online radio station, offers artists the opportunity to buy into their airplay (To be honest: when I first read about this I was slightly disturbed, I still think that artists should get paid when a radio station plays their music. But using it as a tool to sharpen your marketing-lightsaber seemed to be a rather intriguing idea).

So you buy a guaranteed package of plays, upload your tracks, set your airplay to be used up rather quickly, and your tracks get played to a thousand different people (or more, depending an what you pay) over the course of one or two days. Then you follow the feedback and try to figure out what the newly acquired fans additionally like. Actually, that´s also a neat feature of Jango: the Fan Overlap Report tells you exactly that: A statistical output of what your new fans have in common regarding musical tastes. And this should tell you something about the genre your music falls into and bands that may sound similar.

And why didn´t that work out for me? The simple fact that I forgot about statistics is that without a large dataset the statistic does not actually tell you much. While 1000 plays might be a large number, the amount of feedback is not. Liking means at least clicking a button, and that could mean getting up from the couch while listening to the radiostream – a fairly tough endeavor.  With little prior knowledge of how to target my airplay I reached a thousand people of all ages and all musical tastes, got to a play/like ratio of about 4 percent and ended up having a statistic based on a dataset of 40 people telling me that my fans also like Lady Gaga. Ok.

I still think that the basic idea of the Jango Focus Group is intruiging, but if you do not know how to target your group prior to setting it up and if you are not willing to spend more than 30$ and thus get only a thousand plays then you might be disappointed by the results and you won´t learn anything -  as it was in my case. And if I had already known my genre and similar bands beforehand I wouldn´t have set up a Jango Focus Group in the first place. So.

The good news is that this was not the only idea I had to figure out what genre I might fall into (“neurotic ambient” is what my friend Florian Prix calls some of the tracks, but that´s not a genre yet, is it?) and which words could describe my music, and I am going to tell you about my more successful approach in my next post.

In my striving for worldwide fame, glory and unlimited wealth by making music (a very clever idea, if you ask me),  my friends and I decided that a music video would be one of the necessities to bring us there.

Since I already own a therapeutical lamp and a some black molton, we only had to borrow a camera, another lamp, and two tripods to pimp up my 9 million euro studio. And a couple rolls of duct tape.

Georg Eckmayr, who took it upon himself to do the directing and editing, suggested that for our first video we should go for an introductory portrait of hons, and what better song to choose than “gloom”. Ok, so it’s  not the typical hit song that you  would normally select for a music video, but it is, after all, a signature song for the king of gloom (that´s me, thank you for asking).

So with Wiltrud Derschmidt doing the makeup, my role as an actor made me the only non-professional on the set: It was my first appearance in front of the camera. And slightly nervous, me was.  But as it turns out, I have a poser living inside of me that jumped into action as soon as the camera ran, and as it also turned out – with only a few hours of professional makeup, lighting, lots of pictures to choose from and a little bit of photoshopping, I actually look gorgeous.

For more of Georgs work, go visit georgeckmayr.net,
and don´t forget to like and share.

Yours truly,

hons