No Use For Another Face In The Crowd

Well, the whole thing started in July 2003: Just after I had participated in the first Poetry Slam of my life, I got the funny notion to make a CD for people who wanted to come to this event but couldn’t. So I decided to include all the texts I had read out in front of the crowd. To make the atmosphere more palpable, I also added some sound effects (like people clapping their hands etc.) and spoke with different voices (like e.g. the guy who introduced every participant). Because there was also some more space on the CD left, I included some texts I wrote for this event but couldn’t read out, and others I wrote before. As it turned out, this whole experience of reading out texts with different voices, mixing some sound effects to them, made me think to produce another CD. For “Step In Line And Call It Individuality” I wrote new texts, but included just some funny commercials in between. The next CD, “Dopesearch”, was produced in the same way, only that the read-out passages were connected by some kind of story with sound effects. This was a sort of turning point: first because I was signed under a independent record label (fishrecords), second because people I sold the CDs to and I myself realized that it was sometimes really not that “enjoyable” to listen to a CD with around 40 minutes spoken texts. So the next CD went with some real music (a friend, also involved in the fishrecords-management business, composed and played this) so that it became a mixture of spoken and sung parts. And voilá: this was the beginning of a series of new CD projects.Every CD has a special theme. These themes are very much connected to ways of thinking and feeling about contemporary things. This doesn’t mean that they follow certain trends (If that would be the case, this would not be the right platform to sell them…). It means that the texts were written in a specific period, time when it became necessary to express my feelings/thoughts, as pathetic as this may sound at first. Of course over the years I was very much influenced by people’s reactions to the CD projects so that I also tried to write texts which could be interpreted in different ways (e.g. the recent LWS-project). Still the whole idea behind the No Use For Another Face In The Crowd-project is to be open to different ideas/texts of other people. So if you ever think you have a text (poetry/prose) which you would like to have on CD (read out/sung), please contact me.There is still one question which remains: although there are so many produced CDs, what about some live performances? Well, there was one… one on 11th November at RWTH Aachen University. During the Science Night, an event on which every faculty had to present something to the public, I performed two of my songs from the “Love Acts… on three different stages”-album. It worked pretty well, I guess, despite the shitty sound quality due to the place I performed and despite some other inconveniences. But if the whole thing should really get more serious and more professional, I would first need more time for practicing the songs (which I don’t have) and second I would need more people for playing (whom I don’t have). Maybe in the future it would be a nice idea to get some people together and take the whole thing a step further. But right now I guess live performances are out of the question.Of course if one looks back and sees in what a short timespan the CDs were released in the “ol’ days” (like every month one CD) and how long it takes nowadays to produce one CD (sometimes even four months), one realizes that it feels like a fulltime-job, like real work (with not much getting paid…). Together with other things, like studying at the University, going to concerts or other private stuff, one sometimes wishes there would be more time in the world. But… it is worth it all. Everything I experienced in the past, everything I am experiencing now and everything I will experience in the future, was, is and will be fruitful for more CD projects.Over nearly four years, the whole thing has become more and more of a serious thing, as it gave me an opportunity to try new ways of writing (prose/poetry) and singing (including screaming). Another great thing about it was (and still is) to have met many people who helped me in various ways to produce the CDs (big thanks again to fishplatten [R.I.P. fishrecords, long live fishplatten!). I can’t help but thinking that without the support/feedback of everyone who bought the CDs, who wrote into the guestbook and who provided me with new ideas, No Use For Another Face In The Crowd wouldn’t be what it is today: it started out as a One-Face-Band and is now more of a Many-Faces-Band, a whole Crowd, one could say.Thanks for your time reading this Sascha