MR.MUTT : News 002/003
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Two New Releases
Now is Available on Mr.Mutt
SOGAR | EEL AND COFFEE
MINAMO | SHRINE/NEST
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:: SOGAR | EEL AND COFFEE ::
artist: SOGAR
title: EEL AND COFFEE
series: Mr.Mutt CDR Live Series
cat.no. MLive02
format: CDR
release date: June 2003
edition: Lim.ed. 200 copies
duration: 46:11
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Extracts from three live performances recorded in:
KYOTO – Club Metro – January 23, 2003
NAGOYA – Canolfan – January 25, 2003
TOKYO – Roppongi Hills Information Cente / Think Zone –
January 24, 2003
All music produced & performed by Jürgen Heckel
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LINER NOTES
The geometric grids of Japanese farmland were blurs through
the window of the shinkansen. Moments of speed, and distance
travelled, time and space framed into a movie, unwinding as
we gazed through the glass. The bullet train wasn’t as fast
as I had imagined (not bullet-enough, I suppose), which was
just as well, because, like the photographs I had taken
through those windows, there were many moments during our
travels in Japan where I wish time would have stood still.
Back and forth across half the country four times in four
days, we were three Gaijin happily poking away at our
breakfast bentos of eel, salmon, and rice, constructing
private jokes and sharing software secrets.
The shinkansen was our daily reality, as were our live
performances. I have only heard these Sogar recordings once,
in its original state, being performed live by Jürgen
throughout Japan. An experience, like the shinkansen, of
abstracted time and place. Jürgen’s work sums up much of
what I aim to produce in my own; music that is at the same
time fragile, fragmented, engaging, and multi-dimensional.
But the music here is more than just sound, there are,
inevitably, untold stories behind every recording produced;
adventures and mistakes, emotions. For Jürgen, Richard
Chartier, myself, and the friends we made during our
travels, this cd serves not only as a captivating
sound-work, but an archive of the memories of an unusually
warm week in January, feeling at home in a world that has
become unusually small, blurred, like the windows.
Taylor Deupree
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SOGAR BIOGRAPHY
Jürgen Heckel, also known as Sogar, was born in Nuremberg in
1970 and has been living in Paris for 10 years.
He started playing music when he was 19 and became part of
several groups as a guitarist. He then got interested in
creating and processing sound in unconventional ways. Thus
Jürgen manipulates accidental sounds to create light and
fragile melodic textures. The sources of these arrangements
are guitars as well as sounds from mixing consoles,
amplifiers, cables or other aural finds. These sounds are
then reworked on a computer to become a music made of
cracklings, creakings and rich melodic oscillations
exploring the extremes of the sound spectrum by associating
acoustic technique and software.
The result of this work was his first album Basal on the
New-York based label 12k in 2001. He adopted the name Sogar
which means “even if” in German. After the great critic
success of Basal, Jürgen Heckel had the opportunity to
record two new albums, Stengel on the French label List and
again on 12k Apikal. Blend , as Sogar. Besides numerous
concerts, Sogar has also taken part to the Acces-s festival
in Pau and the “sounding” of the gallery 40mCube in Rennes
as part of the Electroni[k] festival. The track “Aiuto
Mathausen” (taken from the compilation Minima-list) has been
selected by Sonic Process, an exhibition about new sounds
shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in the majors
contemporary art centres of Barcelona, Berlin and Porto.
The year 2003 started with the 12k label tour in Japan, to
which Sogar participated alongside with Taylor Deupree and
Richard Chartier. Some of his live performances there have
been documented on the recordings released by the Italian
label Mr.Mutt.
www.12k.com
www.list-en.com
