After having done the "Stoned Waves"-Album, my wife went a bit jealous because she wanted to have songs about our pictures which decorate our apartement.
I borrowed and personalized the title from the 1874 piano cycle "Pictures at an Exhibition" by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky and the 1971 remake by the band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. While the latter mixed classic with rock, I set to music the essence and soul of the images that have accompanied us since 2002. Their different charisma called for different styles of music, instruments and allusions, so that the CD contains stoner, trip-hop, hip-hop, metal, stoner, disco and ambient. My main band member was Max, the punk drummer from Garageband, who played the "Heavy" drum kit. I did guitars, bass, programming, mastering and pruducing. Sounds a lot, but as AC/DC already said: "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap".
Our son Lukas painted this picture in 2007 as an official school work during the arts lesson. It took a couple of weeks to finish it and actually this picture never had a name. Tuber's song "Out of the Blue" inspired me to write this song. There is also Lemmy's bass sound as an intro and as an instrument growling in the background. "Out of the Blue" not only means away from the sadness, but also out of the blue. So it made sense to take a trip into space away from the blue planet, leave the world behind and stop the bus at the celestial equator in the constellation of whales (Cetus). So the picture was named "Bus stop at Cetus".
My wife and I spent our first evening under this picture in our living room, having beers, cigarettes and fun. We wanted to hang it on an other wall but we failed a couple of time. So this picture hung aslant because this picture is free enough how to hang. "Love and Freedom" painted by Gudrun von Rimscha brings together the motif and calm of Massiv Attack's song "Angel" as well as the riff, chorus and power of Rammstein's "Du Hast". To find the balance between Love and Freedom in your life is the main thing you have to do.
Schmidt-Rottluff's picture of the "Wilder Kaiser" in Tyrol and our countless trips to Tyrol gave me the inspiration for a danceable mix of My Sleeping Karma, The Marlboro Men from Switzerland and my love for 70s and 80s disco music. The song symbolizes the lightness and the drive with which we started every trip there, the constant repetition of the motif stands for the wish that our trips to Tyrol should not end.
The crowds and traffic, or the Paris – Dakar Rallye, only briefly interrupt the calm, the even vibrations and the floating of the song. For this song I used Arabic and African drums, an Arabic oud and a synthesizer as an acoustic route across the Sahara to Dakar. The sound effects come from an African market and the sound of 80s rally cars. The picture was painted by Georg Glaser.
My wife dotted our cupboards cover with different colors and with different corks. I've been looking for a familiar structure in this picture since 2012, but I can't. I set your dot painting to music with my stoner sound and Ticki Stamasuri's didgeridoo. She is the only one who not only produces one tone in the didgeridoo all the time, but also plays in a constant rhythm. So I could write a riff to it and add the rainmaker, Indian drums and drums to it.
Samples from My Sleeping Karma, the bass line from Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène IV, Indian drums and GarageBand's Blue Wave guitar effect complement Peter Gersina's post-modern paint-over technique and magic mushroom-smoking monster. A picture that we originally bought as a present for Lukas at our beloved flea market in Wolfratshausen and now hangs in our gallery.y
The song title alludes to your flowers raining from the sky in the magic cube picture of my wife, which symbolize her countless ideas and projects. The guitar motif rises and falls like a fountain, the beat, bass and guitar floating in a vast, reverberant universe. I have copied J.J. Cale's guitar because it represents the lightness of my wife. The picture was painted by Marianne Henselmann.
The crucified fiction is the concession of a crucifix ́ in a Bavarian apartment. Josef Seidl-Seitz ́ Druck glorifies Christ's death and ignores that crucifixion is torture. So the acoustic realization had to lead slowly and painfully to the death of Jesus. This led to the 9.11min first version of the song, whose riff is taken from the Boston band Morne's song "I Will See You." The 13 parts that are always the same and the middle part - a sample of the weeping mother of Jesus and a Greek choir of the dead - stand for the 14 stations of Christ's passion, which are followed by the resurrection and the ascension - the guitar solo.
The single version is faster, also includes 14 blocks and ends after 3 minutes and 33 seconds.
Apollo 13 represents the first modern Icarus. After the two previous moon landings, routine and negligence crept in during construction, take-off and flight. Until the oxygen tanks on the way to the moon exploded and the space capsule with the three astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise on board was able to return to earth thanks to a rescue operation coordinated from the Houston Space Center.
The samples come from the original radio traffic and the television broadcast. The song is called "Stranglehold in Space" and lasts almost 15 minutes. I modeled the riff on the Ted Nugent song "Stranglehold". This picture was also painted by our son Lukas at the age of 5.