The Story of Torch Tapes and the Lost TSU! "Best Of" MC called "COMPLETT"

What do you do when you run out of money? Well you take every job you can get. Friends of mine had left West Germany to Berlin after finishing school to evade being drafted to the Bundeswehr and while they were studying had managed to provide themselves with a healthy income by doing market research street interviews. Well, they did not really do them, merely simulated them as interviewing people esp. in rude Berlin is no fun. So they needed people to write the interviews as they might have happened but considering strict models on who had to have what opionion. Well, that's what I did. There I met Olli who had a MusicCassette Label called Torch Tapes. Olli had a problem caused by his swallowing of a huge piece of hash while smuggeling it through the Berlin checkpoints - without any protection. Basically he was always high as this experience had brought his neural cells in a certain disorder.

He, like me, was a huge fan of The Sister of Mercy and so one evening I visited his flat in a run down appartment building in Kreuzberg. His flat was in a bad state, water had entered and hugh blots of mold were to be seen on the ceiling. He had tried to cover this using tar, which basically did not help much, but made the flat even darker. Beside the entrance he had stacked up about 20 cassette recording decks where he copied his relaeases. I was hugely impressed.

We sat down, drinking beer and wine and listened to his releases. With no exception they consisted of fake film-soundtracks (I mean not the musical ones but the ones with effects and spoken words) with a few syntheziser sounds thrown in for good measure. Torch Tapes are a very specialised field for MC collectors nowadays , so it is very hard to get one's hand on one. But here is an example of what was our background for our endless talks on music: 

VIK PAWEL - DER WELTENEINSAUGER 

You get the idea. Olli was completely convinced that this furthest Anne Clark derivate was a thing, or at least art and basically ordered me to include film-dialogue into my music if I wanted my stuff to be released on his label. 

After the desaster of "The Burning Town" that had drained my finances and confidence, I tried to obly, but still am attracted to this idea. This is why in a lot of earlier stuff (and basically until "Burn Witch, Burn!") you hear movie-dialogue. Most notably in the opening of "Cathedral" (at least on the 7" release, not on the digital rereleases). 

My plan was to release a MC with new material and a MC that would be a collection of old songs, including the first two demo-tapes I had put out, "The Burning Town" and "Road to Hell" E.P. , then already with Henning Köster on guitar.

The two of us would record new material for the original TT-MC, some of it went to "Spark to Flame", some of it is still lying around here....

Needless to say, there never came anything out of this, except that I never got my Sisters of Mercy Bootleg back that I had lended him..... but, to be fair, I got a lot of his too... The contact ran dry a year later and I have no idea what he is up to now. 

I made 3 copies of this "Best of TSU!" called COMPLETT, one was sent to Olli, one I kept and I have no clue where the third went. I had already designed an MC-inlay with all the lyrics (as you see it already got the TT004 item-no for the Torch Tape release). Well. This is it. This is a complete master-tape and I will remaster it using RX 11 in the next weeks. 

What will happen with this stuff.... well, let's see...