Gerrit Roessler

Wintermute at GBBM

Finally! I have a gig in NYC and it is with a new project with AJ Kluth (sax) and Cory Healy (drums) at Good Bye Blue Monday in Brooklyn on February 20th. We will record the gig, so we have demo material for the future. 

The project is called Wintermute after the morally ambiguous AI in Gibson's Neuromancer. Also, it's Winter. And mute music is an interesting concept. 

 

Live bei China

The new Mars Attacks album is finally out! 

On occasion of our great reunion tour through Germany we decided to produce the album we recorded way back in 2007. The material is still fresh and sounds amazing. Guest appearances of Matthias Schubert, Frederik Köster, and Tobias Wember give it an amazing sound like you never heard Mars Attacks before. 

The album is available on Bandcamp as digital download or you can order the hard copy.

http://marsattacks.bandcamp.com/

Cover design by the amazing Allison Sommers.

Studio Photos

Allison's art was featured on the Hi-Fructose blog. She and I worked together on the photography. Some of the shots turned out pretty well. 

Book on Horror Studies

Another book that features an article of mine is out and ready for order now. The book surveys the developments in the horror genre over the last ten years. Overall argument is that somehow in the new millennium horror has experienced a renaissance as an intellectually respectable mode of looking at the world. My article is on Battlestar Galactica and how the moral ambiguity, mixed with the uncanny imagery, has a terrifying impact on us as postmodern and post-human spectators. All the articles are very short and so the book contains ca. 100 vignettes.  

Here the publisher's note:

Amokläufe, Terroranschläge, Vergeltungskriege, Umweltkatastrophen und globale Seuchen: Seit Beginn des neuen Jahrtausends scheint ein Schreckensszenario das nächste zu jagen. In der Alltagsberichterstattung der omnipräsenten Massenmedien werden diese grauenvollen Ereignisse zu einer apokalyptischen Horrorgeschichte umgedeutet und ein Klima der Angst erzeugt.

Die Sphäre der Kultur(industrie) bleibt von den breit geführten Angstdiskursen nicht unberührt: Horror hat Hochkonjunktur, egal ob in Film oder Fernsehen, Literatur oder Comic, Rockmusik oder Videogame. Beste Voraussetzungen also für ein "böses Millennium", ein Zeitalter voller Schrecken.

In Dawn of an Evil Millennium widmen sich 92 Beiträge den Phänomenen des jüngsten Horrors, von Silent Hill und Resident Evil über True Blood und Dead Set bis hin zu The Walking Dead, den Hostel-Filmen und Saw 3D. Das weite Spektrum kulturwissenschaftlicher Ansätze kommt zur Anwendung, um die Vielfalt der neuen Horrorwelle in aller Prägnanz zu analysieren.

 

Invasion Time

The Mars Attacks album Invasion Time is finally available for listen and download on Bandcamp. 

We recorded the album in 2005 right before I left for the US. It contains 7 pieces we had developed over the past few years, playing live all over Germany. Since I was going to be away for almost 12 months Christian Schiller joined the group to replace my rhodes with his guitar. He ended up staying with the group after I came back. Sven Grau plays Saxophone and contributed most of the compositions, Jens Doerr plays upright, and Daniel Schild plays the drums. I am still very happy about the material, which we had a chance to play on festivals, clubs and on the radio in most of 2006 and 2007. It got two glowing reviews, one on Jazz Podium, and one on Jazz Thing, the two major Jazz publications in Germany. Give it a listen on Bandcamp, recommend it to your friends, and let me know what you think. (If you are in Germany and you want to purchase a hardcopy rather than a download, let me know. We should still have some.)

We recoded another album in 2007, which we will release on bandcamp soon. 

Artist Statement

When working with literary theory it can sometimes seem, as if one is moving further and further away from the actual work of art. "Work of art" itself, to give an example, being a contentious term in theory. 

It is thus even more satisfying, when I find that my theoretical concerns always take me back to my work as an artist. I have had many a discussion with some of my colleagues in academia about the question: What is art? What makes good art? etc. Yes, these conversations were as pretentious as I am making them sound -- and my artist friends usually stayed out of it -- but my point is, that these ivory tower contact highs matter more than they may initially seem.

For one, I have always maintained the position that there is no such thing as good or bad art. There is only stuff one likes or that one does not like. This does not mean that art is a free for all. Or rather, it is a free for all, but one should feel compelled to only make art that one likes and not art that one feels one is supposed to make. In a sense, taste, quality, craft are all self selecting processes as I can only judge how "well" something was done, if I have an interest in the category by which I choose to judge it. Had I understood this from the beginning I might just become the artist I always wanted to be. I might have, for example, saved myself the waste of time that was hating heavy metal, since I was constantly judging it by the genre codes of jazz. I am convinced that "learning to like" something really just means learning to assess something in a way that will produce a positive judgement. Affect, emotional responses, exist and they are important, but they are ultimately mere effects of learning the laws of genre. (Think about how much you hated Shakespeare as a kid and how now you call him "the Bard", how boring you thought Mozart was until you saw "Amadeus") 

Secondly, art is always a negotiation. Meaning: the ivory tower is not outside of the "real world" but part of the artwork itself. It is one of the places in which the artwork (stuff) is socially performed as artwork. None of the things I am saying here are original, but it took me the perspective of the ivory tower, the learning of the codes, to become aware of them. 

I have left out the political dimension of the artwork and art production for a reason. The analysis of the politics of art is not a quality judgement. It is not a taste judgement either. The politics of art is an analysis of the discursive qualities of the text under consideration (text in the farthest sense). Or to put it differently, and to get back to the beginning of this etude, what one likes and why one likes is a political question and its interrogation is an interrogation of ideology. It is, as all philosophy, a chicken/egg question: do I like this piece because it fits my politics or are my politics the way they are because of this piece (think "Guernica").

The art that I like deals with this question --these questions-- self-consciously. And that may be, because I am currently reading a lot of literary theory. And literary theory, to refer to a discussion I have had with a good friend of mine, gives me the smuttiest thoughts.    

Camping at Bandcamp

Ah, finally, there is a site that is like a cross between flickr and etsy for musicians. Bandcamp is a well curated and exellently programmed site for bands to host their music and monetize it, if they choose to do so. For now, I only created one for Geraeusch, but I hope Mars Attacks and other projects may follow. 

Here is the Geraeusch Bandcamp site. It features music from my old project with Isa Leal, as recent as 2010.  

The new book is out

It is finally happening: I turned my Staatsarbeit on Christian punk rock into a chapter for a book published by Joseph P. Fisher, The George Washington University and Brian Flota, Oklahoma State University called "The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror." Which, in addition to me, features a number of excellent researchers among them Steve Waksman. I am very excited about this and can't wait to hold the hard copy in my hands. For now the publishing house Ahsgate has just has a pre-order blurb out! Especially on a day where work on the dissertation is going very slowly, this is encouraging news. 

Here is the Waschzettel: Seeking to extend discussions of 9/11 music beyond the acts typically associated with the September 11th attacks-U2, Toby Keith, The Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen-this collection interrogates the politics of a variety of post-9/11 music scenes. Contributors add an aural dimension to what has been a visual conceptualization of this important moment in US history by articulating the role that lesser-known contemporary musicians have played - or have refused to play - in constructing a politics of protest in direct response to the trauma inflicted that day. Encouraging new conceptualizations of what constitutes "political music," The Politics of 9/11 Music covers topics as diverse as the rise of Internet music distribution, Christian punk rock, rap music in the Obama era, and nostalgia for 1960s political activism.

 

Clinton Hill

Today marks the one year anniversary of my move to NYC. And I am sick. Not too badly, just some kind of cold. As I write two baptist churches are competing for my attention with different renditions of different hymns. What I was planning on doing was to work on my dissertation, but instead I am uploading some more photography. I recently bought a couple of cartridges of film produced by the "Impossible Project." They are trying to recreate the formula for making Polaroid film with astonishing results. They have a store here in NYC so I can always try their newest stuff. It's expensive though. More photos under my Photography section on this site. Oh, and I also do twitter now. Except I haven't figured out how to connect this blog to it. Look for Cyborg_Hamlet

I am also picking up on some music stuff. Hope to produce something to show for this summer.

Polaroid Buch

In 2009 I was part of a polaroid show in LA. now, a year and a half later, there is a book with highlights from the show and a number of little essays, one of which I contributed.

If you are in LA, go to the party and buy the book!

Here is a message from Kevin Staniec, the editor of the book and curator of the show:

In its original incarnation, Instant Gratification was a celebratory tribute to instant film. The opening at Hibbleton Gallery was set to coincide with the expiration date of Polaroid’s beloved 600 series; a last hurrah on August 7, 2009. Instead, word spread. The exhibition drew an audience of over 800 enthusiasts on opening night in Fullerton, and a crowd of over 2,000 for the Los Angeles vernissage at Bergamot Station, Copro Gallery on January 9, 2010.
 
Now coupled with a limited edition book – which features over 200 professional and amateur photographers from around the world as well as 30 essayists touting the medium’s invaluable assets – Instant Gratification’s cause continues to expand.
 
Please join us in celebration of Still Developing: A Story of Instant Gratification’s release at Deyermond Art + Books, an independent bookstore and gallery specializing in rare literature, art monographs, photography, architecture and design books.
 
>> BUY THE BOOK
http://www.ismcommunity.org/stilldeveloping

>> DOWNLOAD SAMPLE
http://www.ismcommunity.org/stilldeveloping_sample.pdf

>> RSVP FOR THE POLAROID PARTY + BOOK RELEASE
http://www.ismcommunity.org/rsvp

Saturday, January 22 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm
Deyermond Art + Books
2801 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405