SICKER MAN - Stop The Gravy Train / Hollowed
In the last 25 Years Tobias Vethake aka Sicker Man never stopped experimenting and developing, restlessly working on his musical visions. Though the style of his output may vary at first glance, everything is connected to his atttude, the deep quest for new music and his own musical voice. Every of his 15 releases features a special phase on his journey to true uniqueness. And as our world changed a lot during the last 25 years, so did his music. On his last release, KLOTZ WENZEL VETHAKE, the interaction with other musicians and the political dimension of a musical wake-up call became a main focus.
The single „Gravy Train / Hollowed“ marks a new and fresh look at both, his musical history and present. It features Sicker Man‘s love for dub, noise and electronic music as well his passion for classical composition and spiritual jazz.
For the first time he wrote two pieces for saxophone and combined it with his destinct view on experimental pop and dub. Fragments of synthesizers, beats and electric cello whirl around defined saxophone melodies. Two tracks, that feel like a whole universe. Sicker Man met the saxophone player Matze Schinkopf when he worked as the musical director on the „Three Pence Opera“ by Kurt Weill at Theater Bremen. Schinkopf performs on both tracks.
‘Stop The Gravy Train / Hollowed’ feels like a collaboration of Moondog and The Bug.
Biography
Sicker Man’s main instrument and focal point of his artistic creation is the electric cello, which he processes and modulates to transfer his artistic visions into reality. Since 2004 he has been composing music for film, theatre, radio plays, installations and performance art and releasing numerous albums of his various musical projects on his own label blankrecords. He has been collaborating with international artists and ensembles, as well as pursuing his own sonic explorations by experimenting with alternative performance spaces and different approaches to performance practice itself.
e.g. V/H/S/94 (US/2022), SEANCE (US/2021) OST via Lakeshore Records, Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Volkstheater Vienna, dOCUMENTA(13), Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Imperial War Museum London, world premiere of Alvin Lucier ’s “1000 Years of Resonant Joy” with The Ever Present Orchestra and Oren Ambarchi at Ambient Festival Cologne 2021, composition and production of various albums with alternative hip-hop artist Serengeti (US/Anticon), Fleeting Places, Fragments of Futures Past.
