A new Release ?

After a five-year absence from the field of musical releases, Rainer Straschill made his return in 1997 with his long-awaited Janus CD, a record which should, according to this site, "point in various directions which I will explore on following releases". Strangely enough, the three planned "following releases" ("Die Platte", "1974" and the Klangmärchen Project) have been put on hold, and a whole new set of planned releases has surfaced, almost without previous notice.

Sauflieder Band I: "A Blessing of Beers" has been planned, compiled and released during the evening hours of September 23rd, 1998 - during the construction phase of the No Members Memorial project and of course right in the middle of the recording work for Pop Up and the Cosmo Sessions. So what is this record comprised of ?

Music from the Dustbin...

"A Blessing of Beers" is a compilation of four ambient-ish recordings done in summer 97 as early experiments with delay loops and digital effects used on vocal, synthesizer and saxophone inputs and live sequencing. The four pieces are presented here in a "raw and unedited" manner - the CD contains one hour of material that went straight through the main outs of the mixing console - no edits, no overdubs, nothing left out, nothing added. To round up this bunch of - sometimes strangeish - material, it is centered by a soprano sax improv originally recorded for the Cosmo Sessions.

Raw & Unedited ?

Yes - well, almost. In the case of Telephonics and Hayot und der Plattenheinz, passages which contained audible distortion were cut out; the spirit of originiality was sacrificed for the extended lifetime of you tweeters. Also, the beginning of Hayot contains a pitch bend effect accomplished with SoundForge.

A weird concept indeed...

Why is this abstract (or statistic, to quote Zara) material contained under the header "Sauflieder" (drinking songs)? Where do the strange titles (not to mention the subtitles) of the specific "songs" originate from? To answer these questions, extensive liner notes have been added - which you won´t find on these pages. You have to get the CD to find out...

...and the idea behind it all ?

The following paragraph is an excerpt from the original liner notes from "Sauflieder". May it answer any remaining questions.

Band 1 der "Sauflieder" stellt ein von meinen sonstigen musikalischen Schwerpunkten weit entferntes Experimentierfeld dar. Sollte es die Lebensqualität des einen oder anderen geneigten Hörers erhöht haben, so hat es durchaus seinen Zweck erfüllt - und Hörer, die zu eben jenen gerade näher spezifizierten gehören, können in ferner Zukunft durchaus mit weiteren Bänden dieses Werks rechnen.