May Birthdays 
hi!
three young students from the local fine arts college made a music magazine called SYNK as a master project - we played there for the presentation yesterday, and I also had the opportunity to write an essay on Surf - what follows is the gross English translation 
Balu und die Surfgrammeln –
Loud, fast, singing is overrated. How the Surfgrammeln came into existence
Wikipedia says: "Surf music was a musical style developed in California
in the early 1960s as a mainly instrumental version of Rock 'n' Roll."
Some time ago, I turned on the TV and happened to see "Them", a
horror film from the 50s, where mutated giant ants attack Los Angeles.
That really scared me. It has to be said that the year was 1976 in Simmering*
and I was a freshman at the Kindergarten. Mommy was also not at home.
Some time later - I was a little bit more grown up – our family
frequently visited my grandmother in St. Pölten**. The grandmother
always watched a television program for elderly people ("Good
evening on Saturday" with Heinz Conrads***), and before that one there
was The Munsters - with the beautiful theme music. Being a more mentally
stable person I already could bear the Munsters; a cold shiver still
runs down my spine at the thought of Heinz Conrads. In addition, there
was also radio. The radio program in the early 80s was already horrible,
but older songs were played which I liked - "Room to Move" by John Mayall,
for example. That was significantly better than the Erste Allgemeine
Verunsicherung****, and therefore I began to buy old records and
started playing the guitar.
Later, as a handsome young man with a horrible metallic-blue
Stratocaster copy I fell finally for a genre known as garage punk. The
logical consequence was that I collected compilations containing
pieces of such world-renowned artists from the '60s like The Litter,
The Third Bardo or The Groupies in all kinds of record stores.
In the early 90s two records fell into my hands which shaped
my view of the world almost to the same extent as the ants movie.
One was the compilation "The Surf Creature" with original instrumental
surf of world famous artists such as Jim Doval & The Gauchos, and the
other was the then just-released first album of Man or Astro-Man,
where the same raw music was celebrated thirty years later. Man- or
Astro-Man who also added samples from horror movies (of course from
the 50s) to their songs. The circle was finally closed. Playing in a
surf band in 2015 was already written in the book in front of the
black and white television set in Simmering!
And it has turned favorably that my wife Kate, our oldest son Balu and
my old bike buddy Max also think that rock 'n' roll consists of two
guitars, bass and drums, that it has to be fast and noisy and that
two and a half minutes is a perfectly adequate song length. And that
the most beautiful guitar sound is similar to recordings from a
flowstone cave and that singing is overrated. This was already known
to Jim Doval & the Gauchos in 1963 and it has not changed ever since.
Oh yes - and that our first EP "Los Chicherrones del Surf" (which is
simply "Pork Rinds of Surf" in Mexican) is on vinyl and not on CD is
not surprising with that background story. If you really have to
listen to it in a digital way, you can go to the Bandcamp page of
our label Green Cookie Records (greencookierecords.bandcamp.com)
- please check if the computer monitor is set to black and white
and unplug one of your boxes.
* a less glamorous district of Vienna
** a less glamourous town outside of Vienna
*** an unbearable TV-host
**** a completely unbearable, then popular Austrian novelty band
http://www.surfgrammeln-san.org
https://www.facebook.com/BaluUndSurfgrammeln
http://greencookierecords.bandcamp.com/album/coming-out-soon-los-chicharrones-del-surf-10
Last edited: Apr 23, 2016 15:32:42
