conrad schnitzler & frank bretschneider: con-struct

About the Con-Struct series: Conrad Schnitzler liked to embark on daily excursions through the sonic diversity of his synthesizers. Finding exceptional sounds with great regularity, he preserved them for use in combination with each other in subsequent live performances. He thus amassed a vast sound archive of his discoveries over time. When the m=minimal label in Berlin reissued two Conrad Schnitzler albums at the outset of the 2010s, label honcho Jens Strüver was granted access to this audio library. Strüver came up with the idea of con-structing new compositions, not remixes, from the archived material. On completion of the first Con-Struct album, he decided to develop the concept into a series, with different electronic musicians invited into Schnitzler's unique world of sound. Frank Bretschneider on his "Con-Structions": "I read the name Conrad Schnitzler for the first time in the article about Tangerine Dream in the Rowohlt Rock Lexicon from 1973. The first time I heard his music was only in 1980, when his wave track 'Auf dem Schwarzen Kanal' was played on the radio . . . It wasn't until 1988 that I heard from Schnitzler again, a tape on Jörg Thomasius's East Berlin Kröten Kassetten label. And again almost ten years later his Plate Lunch CDs Rot and 00/106 (1997). But it was all too rough and raw for me, both in terms of sound and organization, kind of mechanically and not really cool. Only after I heard Wolfgang Seidel at the NBI around 2002 with one of his tape concerts, I came slowly closer. Schnitzler's early role as cofounder of two influential bands is one reason for the ongoing reception. Another is his consequence as an artist. 'I'm not interested in having publicity or a public feedback' he declared in an 1996 interview. It remains an open question whether one has to completely refuse to do so. But I was always fascinated by this almost extinct way of being an artist in its full independence. Just as I feel connected, as a self-taught person and as someone who prefers to look forward instead of looking back: 'I don't want nostalgia.' After all it was Jens Strüver who inspired me to work with Conrad Schnitzer's material. I had the idea of flowing music in which patterns develop, shift, dissolve and finally reorganize. A modular system seemed the most suitable to connect Schnitzler's world with my own by triggering and modulating his sounds via a sampling module and supplementing them with my own."