Tiefschwarz are releasing their new album LEFT June 1st on Watergate Records. A new live tour featuring Khan will be available from May 2015. More info soon!
MONDMASCHINE
A magical journey to friendship through audiovisual camaraderie.
Mondmaschine is a collaborative project between Khan of Finland and Gebrüder Teichmann with musicians and video artists from Latin America with the support of Goethe Institut Mexico.
This experiment on filming was the result of chance. Produced at an International 10 day soundcamp-like experience in Malinalco/Mexico 2015. Made on-the-fly from beginning to end. Filmed in 4 days and premiered live at Festival Nrmal - Mexico.
MONDMASCHINE is:
Andy Teichmann LIVE ELECTRONICS GERMANY
Can ‘Khan’ Oral VOCODER/UKULELE GERMANY
Clau Fernández BASS / GUITAR MEXICO/USA
Hannes Teichmann SYNTHS / PROCESSING GERMANY
Ingmar Herrera ELECTRIC SAX / PERCUSSIONS PANAMA
Julian Bonequi EXTENDED DRUMS/VOCALS MEXICO
Mabe Fratti CELLO / VOCALS GUATEMALA
Ronald Bustamante ELECTRIC GUITAR / LAPTOP COSTA RICA
Uli Teichmann FLUTE / CLARINETTE GERMANY
Santi Rodríguez SOUND ENGINEER MEXICO
Ali Mejía CAMERA A / LIVE TIMECODE MEXICO
Eric Erre REALTIME VIDEOMIX / POST MEXICO
INVITED STUDIO MUSICIANS:
Gudrun Gut ELECTRONICS GERMANY
Hans-Joachim Irmler HANDMADE ORGAN GERMANY
PRODUCTION:
Volkmar Liebig Goethe-Institut Mexiko
Eloisa Suarez Goethe-Institut Mexiko
The Enlightenment Machine
Khan - The Enlightenment Machine (Albumlabel 002/Random Noize - 2014)
A nun in Berlin seeking enlightenment. Khan as a male hustler including his own phone sex line on "1-900 Get-Khan" (Matador). Khan the torch singer Gothic Bunny on "Who Never Rests" (Tomlab), as the "Last Standing Disco Band" with Captain Comatose (Playhouse), once around the planet and off into space. Now he’s the bearded big city nun on Albumlabel. The songs on "The Enlightenment Machine" tell small tales of ethics gone astray, interchanged sexes and cheap pearls of wisdom that somehow ring true in the end. "The Enlightenment Machine" is inspired by Brion Gysin's Dream Machine. The eternal spinning of the turntable, boring into the future like a helix. These locked grooves serve as the basis of all the tracks on Khan's new album. They contain dense dub echoes, live percussions, deep sub-basses and the ghostly cello of New York guest musician Julia Kent. "The Enlightenment Machine" requires the same a dream machine does: to sit quietly with closed eyes and allow oneself to be illuminated. Groups accepted. Welcome to "The Enlightenment Machine."
"The more information you get, the less fantasy you have." - Andy Warhol
Candygirl
CANDYGIRL is Adam and Eve, Joseph Fritzl and Angela Merkel. She is German Schlager-kitsch but epic deep-disco-house. Zeki Muren meets David Hockney.
This spinning lollypop is accompanied by the visual work of two Italian artists, Miro Mastropasqua and Onze in form of this cover art and the Candygirl video to be released simultaneously on I‘m Single Records.
(photo by: Paul Graves)
Candygirl remixes by DJ Kaos, dOP, Of Norway, Gollini and Moonoton available on I'm Single Records IMS 011
Angels Of Disguise - Book & CD/DVD/Book Box-Set
Book
119 digital prints of found Internet imagery categorized in four thematic cabinets. 13,5 cm x 19,0 cm.
Text by Tim Stuettgen.
Logging onto a sex-dating page is like a promise, an overwhelming sea of imagery and data. Next to each other one finds fetish-addicts and ordinaries, "Tops" and "Bottoms", "Trannies" and "Sissies". Here, everybody can find a sweetheart. Digital flaneurism, an ongoing desire of searching and finding.
Angels of Disguise (The Abstract Aesthetics of Digital Flaneurism) is a collection of found images from these virtual sex-dating pages that formulates a poetry of teasing. The images show particulars of the human, but the character or identity is obscured: A shape of a chest might count more than what's written on a driver's license. Nobody knows for sure which personality is hidden beyond the image: Is it a constructed identity or an authentic one, a bourgeois or a pervert?
Hierarchies of bodily forms, of beauty or nationality do not make the categories, by which the collection is organized, but the various formal disguising, masking, blurring or highlighting techniques that obliterate the notion of the natural and the real. Hiding is showing.
CD/DVD
Sound collage of found amateur audio off Internet porn sites accompanied by video. 42 minutes.
The investigation took its starting point with the question: why is pornography mainly visual and rarely audio? The examination that followed ranged from professional and theatrically staged to nowadays predominant amateur porn videos, in which the visual and aural setting and the sexualized atmosphere has become as important as the actual sexual act itself.
The material for the Audio-Porn-Megamix (Come Into My Light) sound collage was collected during seemingly endless walks through cyberspace in the same flaneuristic manner as in Angels of Disguise. (The audio material is also featured in the box-set on CD in alphabetical order.)
Video sex portals provide any fetishes and sounds imaginable. From outdoors to body sounds to electronic machinery or simply the next-door neighbours' blaring television set. A major part of the sound mix are corrupted files, damaged by faulty up- or downloading or by improper use of recording equipment. Similar to the Angels of Disguise prints, the digital corruption becomes a mask that disguises or highlights the original document.
The Audio-Porn-Megamix (Come Into My Light) is accompanied by a silent and hardly moving short video recoding of the moon, which digitally has been time stretched to a 42 minutes slow motion movement. The moon, earth's face to face eternal companion, becomes a cosmic metaphor for the infinite and perpetual potentiality and quality of what man has created: the computer and the internet; the digital-age as a symbol of a global and maybe even cosmic human interconnectedness?
Can "Khan" Oral in his own words: "The idea for Audio-Porn-Megamix stared with a question: 'Why is pornography mainly visual and rarely audio?' I started looking for examples and only found some 60s flexi disc that was some kind of a phone-sex recording accompanied by a ye-ye lounge sound-track. I came across Porno for The Blind a rather unexcited narration by someone watching porn, transcribing to the blind what he sees without using any porno slang nor much emotion. I'm not sure if that was just bad casting or on purpose. My next step was collecting audio off of pornographic video material I was looking up on the internet. I realized that the "old school theatrical actors porn" had almost been replaced by massive uploads of amateur video or that what pretends to be amateur. I found interesting that some clips are publicized mute, some original sound was replaced by music, most of the time Top-40, others were corrupted video up- or downloads, in and out of the internet, or simply malfunction recording equipment. My attention went towards video in which the erotic self-portrait managed without much moaning, growling or talking. The room and the sexualized atmosphere became the main attraction. The street sounds, people next door or the camera hum itself under my headphones opened a 3-dimensional room of showing and not showing, intimacy or in your face, corruption and innocence, a room in the room in the room, endless flaneurism."
KHAN - WHO NEVER RESTS (Tomlab 096)
He who never rests..., with heart and blood and beats and laptop. A modern-day blues traveller. First of Finland, then Cologne. New York, Mexico and, now, Berlin. Producer- musician Khan is always on the move.
Who Never Rests is a celebration of a man who is in full control of his sound and vision. With his previous albums on Matador, the journey was just starting. “1-900 GET-KHAN” was the first chapter of the story. Khan launched the persona of a male hustler, selling himself to the audience by performing in a pair of underpants with “KHAN” stitched on the ass. It certainly got the party started! Then with “No Comprendo”, Khan produced a living-homage to the artists that inspired him, collaborating with Diamanda Galas, Andre Williams, Kid Congo Powers, Brigitte Fontaine, Julee Cruise, and Stereo Total’s Francoise Cactus. It’s a true work of sheer class and innovation. Might sound cheesy, but if you listen to it, you’ll get the drift. But then Khan started focusing on collaborations. He toured and produced with Kid Congo Powers (The Gun Club, Bad Seeds, The Cramps) and released “Bad English” (Transsolar). He recorded as Little Annie and The Legally Jammin (with Christian Jendreiko). And he recorded and toured as Captain Comatose (“Going Out” and “Up in Flames”) on Playhouse as the last standing disco band: one giant disco party!