Now we think it's time to introduce one of our most beloved projects,
MIRG. This sweet and fragile thing was founded by former
LAY DE FEAR partipiciants Steffi, Marcus, Stolle & Member in 1999. Since then
MIRG has met just once or twice a year to create some of the most beautiful free impro music. In fact, we met just two weeks ago at the Reuschberg for a 5-day-workshop, which turned out to be most productive, as you can hear now.
To support the process of musicmaking, we decided to keep the recording process quite simple and worked with a MiniDisc-Recorder and one Stereo-Mic, which can easily be carried around to follow
MIRG on their musical adventures. We'd like to start with three sessions, which we did in a row on one afternoon. First was
MONDAMIN
After having breakfast on saturday, 11-17-07, and doing some acoustic sessions right in the kitchen, we switched over to the socalled Blue Salon right next door to do this one. The Blue Salon is a strange mixture between a storage room, where you can find all kinds of kitchen stuff, and leisure room with video players, table soccer, toys for kids and so on. Because of a huge very old harmonium and a self-built, nearly as old home organ also standing there, we always like to do music in there, But mostly this room is just too filled with stuff. Not this time, so we recorded almost every session there.
So we started playing, and things went their way. You can hear Member on harmonium, Steffi on bass and Marcus on guitar and Stolle on the drumtracks. At this point Stolle started strolling through the room to look for some inspiration, and came over to a table full of kitchen supplies. Saw a box of Mondamin, a german starchflour product, showed it to the players and started singing what turned out to be some kind of Mondamin-Commercial.
FREE TIBET
We returned to the kitchen and relaxed. Marcus started painting, Stolle read Perry Rhodan, a german SF-Pulp-Series, Member read the new Eric Clapton-Autobiography and Steffi read in her book of Maroccan Short Stories dealing with cooking with onions, when she suddenly stopped reading, heading over to the Blue Salon and started singing ALLAHUH AKHBAR while playing bowed bass.
Soon the others joined in, Member is playing harmonium, Stolle plays an India Tambura-like Drone with distorted & delayed guitar and Marcus played his wonderful Glockenspiel. The spiritual praying mutated to a freaked out noise meditation - ALLAHUH AKHBAR became FREE TIBET and this thing here was born.
TESTOSTERON/PALE BLUE EYES
Usually, we regard MIRG as our project where we mainly do acoustic, meditative stuff, very sweet and fragile. Not this time. Maybe we listened too much to Jackie-O-Motherfucker in these days, be it as it may, this time we did lots of lofi-noise-drone-stuff, (or punk, as some of us might name it). This one is a good example for it. For the equipment-fanatics let me shortly describe you our electrnics-section: We had a korg-ms-20, a sequential circuits drumtraks drumcomputer, a casio sa-21 child-toy-keyboard , a toy- microphone, each of this sent individually through various effect devices, mixed through a 30-year-old (defect) 4-track-tape-recorder and as a PA we used a equally old and defect Karaoke-Station, which has been out of use for ten years or so till we found it at the loft. This is what we mean when we talk lo-fi.
So on this one you can hear Stolle on guitar, Steffi on bass, Marcus on drums and Member on keys until the noise took over everything so that some of us simply left the room. At the end, Stolle turned downed the volume a bit, took an acoustic guitar and sang Pale Blue Eyes close to the Mike, and right in the middle of this the recording stopped because the minidisc was full, but shit happens as we all know.
...and because we like MIRG very much and because Member is updating everything in 2014 you get now a very upgraded verion of this very special meeting. Much more Anteilnahme
and
You are sitting at the fires of ohia, chanting om helos ra, sitars, double basses and analog synthesizers whirling through your mind. Dragons are rising up your spine, and then you see the light of the moon. No doubt, the Great Mystical Member has got you again. 
This is Stolle's first solo effort. In 1999, insprired by the renewed partnership with Member and the tremendous work done with UBIK paint, he did a series of homerecordings put directly on his new cd-recorder. Very spontaneously done and raw stuff...
In fall 1999, after both of us had done some solo work, we came together at Member's new place to do some recording. This session, that turned out to be most part of our first proper record, will be eternally remembered as the fire sessions. Ever since playing with Lay de Fear, we focus deeply on the spiritual side of the musicmaking. Now, this time, we felt extremely spiritual. While doing a hell of a session, we got totally blown away. At some point Member remarked, that it's getting pretty smoky in here, which did not keep us from playing on. Then he realized that he could not see the recording unit anymore. Of course he couldn't. The whole room was filled with smoke, because the kitchen was burning. We got pretty nervous, but succeeded in stopping the fire quickly. So the piece we just recorded got its name. After that, it seemed that because of the smoke our master-cd was not working, which meant, the whole recording was lost. We are used to that: often it seems that the best music we make is not recorded. We tried to save the recording, but no way. Months later, Stolle took another try, put that magic cd in his player - and it worked. Thus hearing those legendary sessions for the first time, he instantly made a backup copy. Now we finally could finish our first record, almost one year after recording it.
This is my first record, my earliest home recordings, my first experiences with a IV-Track Tape Recorder.
