Communicating with other webloggers Keith Berman had a simple (simple ideas are the best) and excellent idea how to connect webloggers. It's called the Blogger Insider. If you sign up you will be matched with another weblogger and you can ask 10-15 questions to him/her and in return your counterpart asks you 10-15 questions. The questions and answers are then published on both weblogs. The frequency of this q&a exercise is bi-weekly. I was paired with Martin from southwestern Ontario who already has answered my questions frankly and quite detailed on his site. Here are his questions and my answers:

1. Has the focus of German music turned more toward techno? Bands like Kruder & Dorfmeister are all I hear about lately. I must admit that I am neither a big fan of German music nor of techno music in general therefore my answer here can only be very fragmentary. Germany has always been a stronghold of electronic music. Bands like Kraftwerk, Neu!, Faust and La Düsseldorf pioneered experimental electronic music in the 70s. Techno has started in Detroit as a further development of house I think. Nevertheless it has become very big in Germany in the early 90s. The yearly Berlin Love Parade in mid-July with almost a million participants and disc jockeys like Sven Väth have spread techno in Germany. Kruder & Dorfmeister are based in Vienna, Austria (though one of the two is from Bavaria I guess) and are therefore not really German in the strict sense. Their music is not techno but electronic remixing. I listen to them from time to time and like remixes like Depeche Mode's Useless from the K & D Sessions a lot. To listen to a whole album of theirs in one sitting nevertheless I find very difficult as the music is a little too monotonous and predictable for my taste. That really depends on my mood. I am just listening to the whole K&D Sessions and I enjoy it I prefer other current non-techno German bands singing in German. Especially the Hamburg scene is noteworthy. I loved Blumfeld's second album L'Ètat est Moi which was a milestone in German indierock in the mid 90s. Great almost philosophical lyrics. Another great band from Hamburg is Tocotronic. Their early stuff was quite punk rock influenced but their latest album K.O.O.K. is more melodic and mainstream. The lyrics are funny with a laconic touch. This year I discovered Fink who are also from Hamburg but do not belong to the same scene. They make atmospheric folkrock influenced music not so far from Calexico and Giant Sand. Great instrumentalists who tell melancholic stories in bitter-sweet ballads. Another very influential band from a totally different background is Rammstein from East Germany who are even successful in the US. Their teutonic goth-hardrock is not really my cup of tea but they have their moments. On the David Lynch soundtrack Lost Highway there is the song Rammstein which recreates the morbid atmosphere after the Rammstein (a place in the German low mountain range Eifel and an ex-US air base) airplane show disaster (many people died when a couple of airplanes crashed) hauntingly well. Einstürzende Neubauten is another band we should not forget. They are Germany's Sonic Youth but more radical. Their heyday were the 80s. Making music with drilling machines was one of their strengths. They opened new horizons for rock music. Up to date electronic German music I don't care about is released by the Cologne label Kompakt. It has been labelled minimal techno. I find that it is terrible and boring but maybe it will turn out to be a trendsetter like Kraftwerk's Autobahn in the mid 70s. I doubt it.

2. Do you think that machines make life easier, or in fact serve to cause more stress? A question you could write a dissertation on. I feel that there is no definite answer to this. Man's use of advanced machines as computers and robots changes the focus of our life. It gives us much more time to think about ourselves and the machines. It alienates us from basic needs like food. There is the danger that we get too self-centered. But on the other hand now we have much more freedom. We can choose to use the machines or not to use them. Before we couldn't. We can afford to go into a Zen monastery and meditate for a month to come back to our roots. But there is a tendency that the fully automatised world takes over. For example cars without electronic aids are almost impossible to purchase today. If something goes wrong with the electronics you are totally helpless (btw I am so unpractical that I was quite helpless already before).

3. Do you play any games on your computer, and if so, what is/has been your favourite? Not really. The only computer game I got into was Tetris. I used to spend hours of my student life playing Tetris on my Atari ST. Later on I played the Windows version. One day I got above the score of 32767 and the score went back to zero as apparently it was defined as a short integer. That was the end of my Tetris playing days. I also used to play chess with programs (especially Chessmaster 2000) and via the internet at the Internet Chess Club. The internet is a great way for playing chess but I would prefer to play real people in front of me in a pub.

4. Can you think of a song whose lyrics you find most meaningful? Check my post on Nick Drake's Road. Another song with lyrics that touched me a lot is Neil Young's Cortez the Killer. The history of the conquest of America by the Europeans from the point of view of the Indians. So sadly true and moving. The lyrics of almost every second Joni Mitchell song speak to me. Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed have amazing lyrics too. As so many others...

5. What's your take on internet music? Do you still buy all your music, or do you download most of it now? I download a lot to check beforehand if it is worthwhile purchasing it on cd.

6. You have an extensive and multi-faceted music collection. What got you started? Was there anything in particular that drew you in? Don't really know. My first love in my teens was early Genesis from the Peter Gabriel days. They created their own world in music. I guess that has always been the biggest attraction of music for me. A parallel world I can dive into to forget the real world around me for a while.

7. What's the first song you remember hearing? I have got such a bad memory. One of the first which left a mark on me was Mrs Robinson by Simon & Garfunkel. A melody I will never forget.

8. If you could spend a day with anyone, (current/historic/fictional) who would it be? Nice question. I guess it would still be the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche whom I admired for his lucid vision of mankind in my youth. If I could choose two it would be Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady when they travelled the US in the late 40s and early 50s.

9. What's the song you least like to admit you think/thought is/was cool? Neil Young's Every Man Needs a Maid. On the verge between kitsch and romance.

10. Can you play any musical instruments? No.
11. It's said among my friends that each person can do three things better than anyone else. What are your three? A hard one. I can only answer it in an ironical way. In every period of my life I was always able to find a best friend. That is something quite rare I feel. I am quite good at giving up smoking and starting again but a good friend of mine is probably better at it. Maybe I am the best male partner in my personal four person chess version which is called touche-bouge (touch-move) where you play with someone of the opposite sex and one person touches the piece which has to be moved and the other moves it.

12. Considering you're attuned with the music scene, and live in Germany, I wonder if it ever bugs you that north americans tend to think German popular music ends with Nena, Falco and Trio. You are not so wrong here. New wave was the last German style I liked. Don't forget thee German rap band Die Fantastischen Vier here. Not only their smash single Die da was great. Their lyrics are twisted German colloquial speak. See also answer to question 1.

13. Do you have any pets? If so, elaborate. No. We had a cross-breed dog when I was 13-15. I will never forget the day she was run over by a car. I listened to Alan Parsons' Project Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe short stories transformed to pop music) that day. The first and only time in my life I ever encountered death in a physical way. The end of my youth.