Werner Dafeldecker & Valerio Tricoli - Der Krater

A Note from Valerio Tricoli

It is always very, very difficult for me to write about the music I was personally involved in making. As a matter of fact, a good reason for me to make music is precisely that I don't want to be a writer, and also to be able to shut up… for once.

Yet, once a record is finished, invariably arrives the request from the publisher - in this case the great Lawrence English - asking for a 'press sheet', a very weird, but apparently necessary form of literature in which you (me, in this case) have to say something about the record, and this something will then be taken up by those who will eventually write about the record in fanzines specialising in avant-garde or electronic music, so that this text - this miserable text that stinks so much of an exercise in style and that you are unfortunately reading and I'm unfortunately writing - will be repeated, again and again, in different forms for as long (generally not very long) as someone else writes about it (the record? Or perhaps only this wretched text in Italo-English?). And so happens that all those tales of more or less real influences and half-read epiphanic books; of networks of poetic and political references and offhand quotations from Mark Fisher will be repeated ad libitum while the music is hiding in shame from the paper (or from the screen-paper-simulacrum or whatever we might call that thing).

We have a special word in Italian for this stuff: supercazzola. If I think about all the supercazzole I wrote, this one included, I want to hang myself. And yet, I'll have to write more.

And so, dear listeners of the avant-garde, I say what's there's to say: all that matters to me in that elusive fact we call music, hear hear, is its unspeakable. What digs a crater in my soul, and settles somewhere in the neuronal circuit, is a nameless spirit.

Anyway. That dreaded moment, the press-sheet-request moment, took the form of a message from Werner: "Lawrence needs a press sheet. I am full with work. Can you write something about our nightmares?" Yes Werner, I can: I don't want to, but I can. And by the way, you've already done all the work. Thanks and bis bald.

And so I leave you, dear listeners, with Der Krater, recorded live in an improvised fashion and then re-composed in the Bavarian autumn: two nightmares - Werner says - for double bass, synthesiser and live-manipulated Revox tape recorder, which we hope you'll enjoy as much as we do.