The TSU! - Stompin' Crash recordings with Karl Parchow
Until 1990 I basically had been an island, writing, recording and taping all the stuff by myself and never gave it to anyone to listen to.
As the gear I used became more and more professional (an Atari-ST with the "1st Track" sequencer by Geerdes running on it and the Casio CZ-1 as well as a Casio RZ-1 for the drums, I finally thought, I could "dare" to expose me to the world.
On the other side, the internal pressure had built up with my life being completely out of control for a few months, so there had to be some kind of (pressure-)release. It is hard to describe, but I was actually "forced" by a power stronger than my own will, to publish some demo-songs.
In the small-ads-board at the university I was looking for musicians to cooperate with me and I saw the flyer by Karl Parchow, a drummer who had simple and cheap recording facilities.
I phoned him, we got a deal which sounded reasonable and I had 3 weeks to get my stuff together. Frantic re-editing of the sequences (1st Trick did not use visual editing but the recorded midi-values had to be corrected by hand!!! (every single one of them - there was (thankfully) an update a year later, which automised stuff).
So I went there and recorded the stuff. I think he had something like an 8-track tape machine, a digital reverb and a mixer. That was basically all. So in I went, hooked my stuff up and recorded (2x Casio CZ1, 2xCasio RZ1, 2x Vocals, 1xGuitar).
I think that Karl found this stuff very strange, but basically encouraged me a little bit to become more adventurous (harmonising!!!) vocally.
That was February 1990.
In Mai 1990 I met Henning Köster, an old school-friend of mine. We had always closer contact as we had been the two youngest in our class. That was a class-reunion and we drank a lot and talked a lot and he told me that he was playing the guitar. We met some weeks later in my home and recorded basically the "Road to Hell EP" there live. We did a photo-session and so "TSU!" was born.
Although Henning had not been part of the recording of "The Burning Town", the demos were sent out, after we started the duo, so in the promotion-material for this, he is already in there.
The four songs for "The Burning Town" E.P. were:
1. Eyes of God
2. Nightsuit
3. Wish
4. On the Wire
Response to the demo was very bad, there were some people that made the active effort to actually insult me personally. As bad were, of course, the text-modules by the bigger companies, elegantly written but a mass-posting.
Recording and distribution had drained the budget for The Sinister Urge, so the next songs would be recorded at home with Henning's help. A second demo MC "The Road to Hell" was copied at home about 15-20 times.
When Henning left to work in another city, the last songs would be Ivory Tower and Target. Ivory Tower again was recorded at "Stompin Crash", this time with the full Casio-Setup (CZ-1, HS-1, SK-5, RZ-1) and Henning on guitar, me on vocals. The sparse mixing though did not help the song which - in my opinion was worse than the demo whe had recorded for "COMPLETT".
With Henning gone, I had to pick up the guitar again myself and recorded "Lethal Urban Zone" again at Parchow's studio alone.
I had acquired so many tools so that I was able to set up a studio of my own. I bought a used VESTAX MR-44 4-track tape-recorder and had started to get really good at recording songs with it. The only thing left was mixing and mastering. The Crimson Dance was mixed like that (home-recording on the VESTAX) in Karl's old studio.
He then went to produce bands in Siegen's JuZe where we spent our advance money for "The Emerald Touch", recording most of the songs for the CD there. 5 Songs however were recorded at The House of Usher's Studio in Euskirchen (they were the demos that led to the record contract, they were then remastered for the CD release). But more on that in another post.
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