Brainticket - Zuerich / Lausanne [Live] (2018)

There are many stories to tell around the people of Brainticket. Please pick the parts that you like – probably I am too loquacious...

The story goes back to the 1950’s. Basel and Geneva were the places with the best jazz musicians of Switzerland then. There was a flowering traditional scene in Basel around trombone player Peter Fürst. In his band the banjoist was a Willy Seefeldt. And there was also a small group of musicians, who followed the tracks of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and then the protagonists of Cool Jazz, first among them pianist George Gruntz. I was a young saxophone player, and my idols were Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan.
When I left Basel in 1960, we kept the contact, and so I knew of the arrival of two new pianists in Basle. Hans Deyssenroth lived just across the frontier in Germany and worked as a software engineer in the chemical industry. Joel Vandroogenbroeck arrived from Belgium and was soon established as versatile member of different groups.
Some years later the jazz scene underwent drastic changes. Joel Vandroogenbroeck did the step from jazz to soul music, and shortly afterwards I met him again in a session in Helmuth Kolbe’s studio in Winterthur, recording strange psychedelic music. Only later I realized that I had witnessed the start of „Brainticket“. At the same time New Orleans fan Peter Fürst had changed to the flute. Now he did free jazz improvisations, together with his son, percussionist Markus, who treated metal sound sculptures. Willy Seefeldt also had abandoned the banjo for analog synthesizers and soon joined Brainticket. I was established as composer of film music, had my own 24-track recording studio with a bunch of analog synthesizers and represented ARP, EMS and Sequential Circuits in Switzerland.
1980 Brainticket was revived with Joel, Willy Seefeldt and Hans Deyssenroth, and one year later Joel and I formed a duo. We tried to bridge the gap between jazz improvisation and electronic music with an array of acoustic instruments, synthesizers and drum machines. And there was Hans Deyssenroth, who had in the meanwhile created sensational improvising music software, implemented in small computer boards. So it was only a small step to couple our duo with Hans and Willy in 1983. We gave our first concert as a quartet during a symposium „Computer und Musik“, some more followed during the next year. And our duo also survived until 1986.

In 2013 I got a strange email from a Tom Schneeberger in Berne. He had to clear an old film archive, and found some old multitrack tapes, one with the label „Spoerri, Lausanne 1984“. Was I interested? Of course! In 1984 I had played a concert at the „Musikmesse“ (Music Fair) in Lausanne together with Joel Vandroogenbroeck and percussionist Markus Fürst. It was the year of the introduction of MIDI, and I was invited as representant of the recently founded „Swiss Center for Computer Music“ to speak and demonstrate the first sequencer programs for the Commodore 64. We had no idea, that our concert was recorded by the mobile studio of Jürg Heuberger. I fetched the tape and went to Powerplay Studios, one of the few remaining studios with a working 24-track tape machine. A first rough mix sounded interesting, but only four years later I had the courage to commission a real mix. Patrick Schwitter, one of the finest mastering engineers in Switzerland, did a great job, and so we have an interesting document of live improvised electronic music from 1984.
~ Bruno Spoerri, Zürich 2017