Ich schwöre ich hab Angst

I swear I have fear

There was never a certain idea or a plan. There was probably an imagination, a desire for a concept, but no definitiveness. The improvisational element of my music is so prominent that I struggled to enforce a framework or general conditions. In the end, the concept developed as the work came into being.

With a strong focus on indetermination and personal involvement with the irrational, I experience certain psychological effects, ideas, and emotions beyond music itself. One of them is the transformation of a sense of freedom and nothingness into an inability to be present and attentive, leading to an almost unbearable, constant, and irritating wish to be somewhere else. Suddenly, the idea of freedom shifts me into a reality in which I fail to be present. In this moment, I wish to be elsewhere, to swim away, to get completely lost in the sea.

I think that the ideas of freedom and individualism in Western societies have led to a lack of common vision, heavily influencing how we live and make art or music. I see fear and fear-driven behaviour all around. I wish to point to this, as I fear that inattentiveness is becoming omnipresent and a part of all of us. I feel that this is not a world in which I wish to live and make music. I wish to be somewhere else.

«Ich schwöre ich hab Angst» is a collection of partly conceived and partly improvised pieces, created within this mindset. It is an edit and mix of recorded live performances from Vas, Venice, and Lago in Italy during the summer of 2021, alongside recordings from rehearsals and live sets in Berlin in the autumn of 2021.

My occupation with John Cage´s “Silence Lectures” was the starting point for my work on this album. I was inspired by his idea of an experimental action which is “generated by a mind as empty as it was before it became one”. Cage spoke of the “pleasure of being slowly nowhere” which formed a connection in my thoughts between individualism and attentiveness.

At the same time, the wish to come up with a system in improvisational and compositional processes brought me to understand my methods, structures, materials, and forms as spectra, passing from determined to undetermined, composed to improvised, rational to irrational. This helped me to form a kind of skill set that consciously and subconsciously influences how I play, how I prepare and compose pieces, how I improvise, how I make music.

Text by Michał Krajczok
Artwort by Joanna Harvey