… when everybody’s publishing their „Best of 2019“-lists — so why shouldn’t we?

According to the 12 days of Xmas, here are my 12 favourite and most listened to songs of 2019:

Orville Peck : "Dead of Night"
Bruce Springsteen: "Tucson Train"
VNV Nation: "All Our Sins"
J. S. Ondara: "Days of Insanity"
Neil Young & Crazy Horse: "Olden Days"
The Specials: "10 Commandments"
Ride: "Clouds of Saint Marie"
The Murder Capital: "Green & Blue"
Ghost: "Mary on a Cross"
Marianne Faithfull: "No Moon in Paris"
Sleaford Mods: "Kebab Spider"
Leonard Cohen: "Thanks for the Dance"

You see — lots of old heroes to be found in this list: maybe it’s because I’m getting a bit vintage, too (I’m writing these lines on my 57th. birthday). But as for cheese and whisky: the older, the better (until it goes mouldy or vanishes completely).

Ayuma & I wish you a very merry festive season as well as a hopefully splendid new year — and we’re pretty sure this time that the long awaited Antichrisis album „Foxfire“ will finally see its release in 2020.

It has been a bit quiet in the last few months due to me having to be very busy in my daytime job. That’s exactly why it sometimes takes us longer than usual to complete an album, hence I get asked quite often if it wouldn’t make life easier for me if I didn’t have to go about my daily work but make my living just out of music instead.

Well, being able to make one's living solely out of music is anything but easy because there is simply an oversupply of music these days: the market is more than saturated and those musicians and artists being lucky enough to find their niche are forced to engage themselves in time-consuming social media-activities while also having to tour their asses off. It simply boils down to the fact that you have to put a lot more effort in marketing and PR as well as constantly reproducing the music you’re already familiar with on stage than on creating new music or exploring new musical territories.

Of course it would be nice if I could concentrate completely on creating and producing music 7 days a week. But this would also mean that I would have to think about marketability and marketing strategies, expectations of target groups, public relations a.s.o for 7 days a week, too. And this road can quite easily lead to point where you do to care much more about what your audience might be expecting from you (because you are dependent on record and ticket sales) than what you would like to do.

That's why I'm glad to support myself with the monthly income of my daytime job. It goes without saying that office work is not always exciting and that basically the time from Monday to Friday from 7 am to 3 pm is reserved for my ‚normal“ chores, so that musical activities are restricted either to evening hours, weekends or holidays. But that modus operandi also allows me not having to give a tinker’s cuss whether or how our music can be promoted or exploited commercially, which expectations Antichisis should come up to or when our next album has to be released -- and this means absolute freedom in artistic terms, because we can write and create the music we want to do, whenever we want to do it and, best of all, without the pressure of release dates, press schedules and photo calls (been there, done that, threw away the T-shirt).

However, this also means that depending on circumstances delays may occur in the completion of an album; either because of Ayuma & me having to be busy in our daytime jobs or because of unexpected health issues requiring longer breaks (yes, we are definitely not getting younger, folks).

Nevertheless we’re still working on the release of Antichrisis’ forthcoming album „Foxfire“ and hope that there will be no more incident occurrences in coming months that could cause further delay.

In order to shorten the waiting time for „Foxfire“ I went down the basement (despite the immortal Ramones suspecting that there might be something down there) to search the archives: of course my musical activities didn’t start with Antichrisis but with a project called „Assorted State of Decay“ (yes, it’s „decay“ and not „delay“, you ribald persons -- and no, the acronym „A SOD“ was not intended!) in the Eighties.

I was a pretty miserable batcave-goth at that time with a fatal fondness for the colour black, an attitude that is also reflected in the songs that I wrote back then. A perfect example is „Black Letter Day“, recorded on a 4-track tape deck by using a Mattel Synconics 5281 as drum computer, so this is definitely a real Lo-Fi-experience, but maybe it’ll give you an insight in the very early beginnings of my musical origins, anyway.



By the way: I was very sad to hear about the passing away of Scott Walker in March 2019 and Roky Erickson in Mai 2019: Scott Walker simply had one of the most beautiful voices that I’ve ever heard, and beyond that he was an artist always in search for new forms of musical expressions while being far ahead of his time and the audience’s listening habits.

And when it comes to Roky Erickson, all I have to say is that „I walked with a Zombie“ is one of the greatest songs of all times. Both Scott and Roky have been one of a kind and will be sadly missed.

Good news for all CD hunters and collectors out there: GSP just released a CD-version of „Baduhenna“ containing all separate tracks of the Digital Download-version except for the over 46 minutes long title track.

This CD is limited to 100 copies and is available via GSP’s website for 12.- €.