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

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

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.

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.

Artist:  Hons
Album:  Necessities
Review by Matthew Forss

Hons is a Vienna-based electroacoustic musician with a knack for experimental sounds and gritty, trip-hop grooves from unimaginable and indescribable sources.  Necessities grew out of Hons’ heavy dose of studying electroacoustic, electronic, and experimental music at ELAK, which is a Vienna music institute. Hons’ academic approach to music-making is not shrouded in complicated lyrics or obtuse arrangements.  In fact, Necessities encompasses all of the elements of a great down-tempo/trip-hop album that shines in a very dark way.
“Feel” is the opening track with a bit of a raspy, metallic noise and Hons’ languid vocals.  The trip-hop beat contains scratchy, electronic tones with tinny-like piano reverberations and a slow, percussive beat.  The beat moves into a dark, brooding, rock-like guitar solo near the end of the track.  The few seconds of a rock guitar buried in the background does not diminish the electronic essence of the composition.  The trip-hop beat and electronic embellishments propel the track deeper into a world of the unknown with rousing success.

“Fly” opens with a staticky whoosh before a crystalline sound of tinny percussion and a trip-hop beat drive the haunting musical flow.  The higher, metallic shrills are almost like strings, while the fuzzy electronica suggests gunfire in the distance.  The blurby electronica is more like a slow, pitter patter rhythm that culminates into a noisy crescendo of stirring bliss.  Also, the track is completely void of vocals, which does not affect the musical outcome in a negative manner.

“Think” is more of a dark, contemplative journey into the inner workings of deep space with echoing reverberations resembling a flute with the drone of a sitar.  However, none of those instruments are used.  The meditative sounds are broken up with a few tinny clicks and blips with various noise resembling cicadas and a factory conveyor belt.  If anything, “Think” is a little more avant-garde in its approach, but it is still a standout piece of spacey, ear candy.

“Grump” is a rock anthem for the trip-hop age without all of the traditional repertoire.
The music features a rhythm that resembles a machine gun in the distance.  This sound is interrupted with a few piano-like keys interspersed throughout the track.  Halfway through the track, a swishy, metallic sound creates a slightly noisier musical environment with good results.  The last half of the track features an almost jazzy piano medley amidst the noisy metallic swishes, imitation gunfire, and trip-hop nostalgia.

“Feed” contains electronic sounds that are more characteristic of construction equipment and woodpeckers.  The metallic drilling, hitting, and tapping is closely aligned with a noisy, metallic background sound with a lush mix of miscellaneous blips and rasps.  The aptly-named track could signify a gigantic dinosaur eating a spaceship for at least a few minutes.  The last part of the song uses less of the metallic interplay and places more emphasis on a Western guitar outro, which does not detract too much attention away from the more exciting electronic base.

“Wait” is a very short guitar track with some background noise without a trip-hop beat.  Perhaps the track is more of an intro or outro.  Either way, the music is relatively characteristic of the other tracks.  “Ennui” is not exactly a track of boredom as its name suggests.  In fact, it features a few vibraphone-type notes before moving into a metallic wash of space-driven colors.  However, it only lasts a brief minute or two.

Hons single-handedly redefines electroacoustic music using an academic approach that is unique and refreshing.  The fourteen tracks represent a range of noises, metallic washes, and ambient soundscapes that hint more at trip-hop than dub. The few vocals were refreshing and a nice addition to the music.  Hons knows how to create dark, ambient, and brooding melodies that are slightly quirky and never dull.  For trip-hop fans looking for a little more ‘space’ in their diet, Necessities should satisfy that taste hands-down.

by Matthew Forss  (Rating:  5 stars out of 5)
—————————————————–

Artist:  hons
Album:  necessities
Review by Michael Morgan

Fans of early Pink Floyd will be in good company when they listen to the music of Vienna-based electronic musician and composer, Hannes Köcher, aka hons. His latest full-length album, necessities, brims with industrial sounds and creepy psychedelic rants. As bizarre and gloomy as the songs get, the artist does not lose focus within each song; whether it’s a series of jabbering beats and dodging piano lines, or, bleeps and poundings of ear-walloping throes, necessities is meant to be played at full blast.

“gloom” has the singer moaning in a low baritone along a slow moving melody. The song builds up slightly with a backing piano and then gets blasted by a loud gasp of what sounds like dirty clavicle and screams; a combination of Bowie and Roger Waters, as if they were splashing waves in the pool together, telling each other dirty jokes.

“grump” is a primitive wall of sound that could make elephants tap dance.  The sharp thumps and  scuzzy bass carouse around a trippy plinking piano. The middle of the song has the percussion going ballistic as if the wall of sound sprung a leak and all of the water is now flooding out.  “grump”‘s aggressive experimentalism and sound voyages are reminiscent of early Beck records.  Hons mixes it up a bit towards the end and has a low octave piano take over the lead melody, which then drags the liquid percussion of clacks, bangs and shaking.

Another artful wall-banger is “rise.”  The song starts off with a sassy rhythmic pulse of static aplomb and rat-tat-tat beats, along with periodic industrial noise fills.  Ever so quick to change up the direction of his song, “rise” gets rescued by a series of synth bleep organs twitching out a simple circular melody.  A loud rush of reverb and fizzy textures towards the end of the song cap off an interesting, bumpy four and a half minutes.

The loud thrashes of industrial sounding machines with different textures is a constant theme throughout the album.  Even on the very brief tracks this theme permeates the album.  “ennuie” has slightly dopplerized machines, slowly whizzing by– gone in an instant.

“feed” is a conglomeration of machines and industrial sounds that has a thematic deep bass synth line, as deep as the bowels of hell. There are sporadic squeals and guitar reverb and fuzz. The last minute is distilled into a crystalline solo electric guitar that replays the main thematic line. The song would be great for TV documentaries on animals (“Animal Planet,” perhaps?).

“think” is another brief interlude. It’s a round of ringing and resonating bells sometimes accompanied by brewing industrial noises. The last ten seconds of sound are reminiscent of a diesel truck standing with its engine on.

“love” is a hodgepodge of computerized bleeps and low octave bowel-moving yaws. Hon’s hymnal-like delivery and monotone voice mixes well with the whimsical library of odd technologically-indulgent clatter.

“sleep” begins with what sounds like a piano lesson– a bare basic piano played as if the artist is being told what to play.  The pianos quickly become more complex with arpeggiated and frenetic high octave flourishes. The pianos towards the end get wrestled around by a slow moving lull of percussion and bass.

“dream”‘s eerie tempo and low-level thumping has the kind of fear-gripping terror that horror movies would crave to have on their soundtrack. For a moment what sounds like a swarm of insects buzzing may get stuck into the headphones and catch listeners off-guard making them swipe at the air for anything that moves.

“feel” shows off the singer’s psychedelic Pink Floyd-esque lyrical delivery. The deep gassy sneer and nasal tone fits the icy, gray nature of the song, as if it’s being peeled off of the sidewalk like a stick of gum.

“smile” has a female vocalist crooning her way through an eerie background of twitches and static. The song’s melody and sweet delivery is muddled by the noises in the arrangement.  Without such noises, the song would have been a refreshing addition and deviation from the raw experimentalism on the album.

This kind of psychedelic experimentalism, blending industrial noise and melody is not for the faint of heart. Fans of Syd Barrett-era Floyd will appreciate Hon’s attention to production detail and composition.  Music supervisors might also want to check out hons’ dark and gloomy musical underbelly; music fit for cinema and documentary.

 by Michael Morgan (Rating:  3.5 stars out of 5)
———————————————————

Artist:  Hons
Album:  Necessities
Reviewed by:  Jason Randall Smith

Based in Vienna, Hannes Köcher spends his days designing software and working on art installations for various media projects.  As Hons, the composer and musician within comes out to play, deeply nestled within the sonic framework of electronic and experimental music.  The songs that make up Necessities have taken up permanent residence on the dark side of the harmonic climate, where musical avenues are patrolled by paddy wagons.  It’s as if the cerebral contents of the mentally stable were dumped onto a table and the neurons started to form notes, scales, and its own time signatures.

Hons takes many of his cues from the industrial subgenre, his compositions riddled with dirty static and abrasive frequencies that disrupt tender moments, but never shuts them out entirely.  “Feel” begins the album with one of the few vocal performances, fighting its way through a wall of distorted guitars in order to express heartbreak and despair.  There’s an air of paranoia that permeates this and other selections on the album.  “Dream” feels even more creepy and uneasy, its talking points relegated to eerie sustained notes, cloudy chords, and isolated thumps.  The tension-building “Fly” is the soundtrack to that reoccurring nightmare of the stalker or killer robot that just keeps coming after you, no matter how many obstacles you put in its path.

Hons works best when he pits the sensitive and the jarring against each other.  Several songs incorporate this arrangement and the results are quite intriguing, especially on “Smile.”  The delicate vocals of fellow media artist Mimu Merz (gently singing an e.e. cummings poem) are surrounded by jagged shards of static and bleeding low-end ruptures that would make most subwoofers beg for mercy.  A rhythm guitar hangs out quietly in the background, strumming a gentle melody that restores balance to the piece.  “Love” finds itself caught up within the same sonic limbo as a series of bleeps and bloops maneuver their way through a thicket of noise.  Hons remains somber and reflective through it all as he sings, “Here I am again, standing in the rain, hoping that I can love again.”

The vinyl crackle and percussive boomerang of “Gloom” find Hons within a lower vocal range, bringing images of Edward Ka-Spel from the Legendary Pink Dots to mind.  The poetic imagery of the lyrics are striking and effective, growing with intensity as the rhythm becomes more chaotic and disoriented.  “Grump” taps into that dizzying feeling and runs with it, rolling and reversing fuzzy guitars along with the drums.  Towards the end of the song, an incessant hissing imitates the shake of a tambourine.  The bass pulses on “Rise” are the only thing keeping the song from giving way to the gunshot claps of its digitized snares.  “Sleep” closes the album on a seemingly innocuous tone with its childlike piano intro and ambient layers of sound.  However, this is all a setup and it doesn’t take long before the nightmare scenarios arm wrestle the composition into submission.

Necessities isn’t for everyone, but the album wouldn’t be as sonically uncompromising or convincing if Hons tried to be all things to all people.  Perhaps he can be seen as an audio excavator, plunging deeper into the harmonic regions of darkness in order to extract the hope and sensitivity buried far beneath the surface.  It is up to listeners to decide whether he can actually pull it off or not, but hearing his attempts to do so is exactly what makes this a noteworthy album.

by Jason Randall Smith  (Rating:  3 stars out of 5)
————————————————————-

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.

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