The origin of my work dates back to the year 1986 when I visited as a 7 year old boy the public music conservatory in Cottbus, Germany to learn a musical instrument. After being shown a violin to play on it, I quickly became bored. This instrument always sounded the same and the tone was somehow sad to me. In my childish naivety, I dreamed of being able to play any instrument in the world … just ANYTHING. Was this a fantasy?
Years later, this dream became reality when I discovered that turntables were being used as musical instruments to create new and exciting sounds. I eagerly became immersed in this artform and spent years learning “scratching & beat-juggling” techniques. While doing this, I pondered “what actually defined a musical instrument as such?”
I saw the solution to this riddle lies in the notation of music – the musicians’ elementary means of communication to convey what is being played. So at the age of 17, I began self-study and searched through all kinds of books on music theory at his local library. To my astonishment, I found nothing in any book about a turntable being used as a musical instrument. But I had at this time no relation to the academic field of music in which already some thesis were published by scientists like Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen, Doc Rise and others.
After seeing a picture of a music professor in a Musicology magazine at the local library of Cottbus, I decided to write a letter to try and contact the professor. Much later I learned that this man was one of the most important musicologists of the 21st century – his name was Prof. Karlheinz Stockhausen.
In my letter, I described to Prof. Stockhausen “a new kind of musical instrument with which it is possible to play “everything” – every sound, every instrument and every tone in the world”. In my youthful exuberance I also reported to have developed the basics of a musical notation that would be revolutionary and redefine the possibilities of making music.
A few weeks later, surprisingly, came the professor’s answer. Stockhausen wrote the following sentences to me in his reply, “Please study my pieces -Electronic Study 1& 2- before you use such words as “revolutionary””. On 28.03.2002 it was then so far. In a 90 minute lecture I explained the basics of turntablism to the professor and presented the fundamentals of S-notation. Stockhausen was visibly impressed and a long-lasting pen friendship developed from it.
In 2013 I published a draft of the thesis -Theory of Motion- which legitimizes turntablism on the basis of S-notation music theory. This work was sent to various universities and academics, but none responded with interest in presenting this work to a larger audience. Up to this point scratching and turntablism was a pure hip hop phenomenon which was rather smiled as an art of noise.
In the development of the turntablism / controllers culture were mostly people involved who have no music-academic background.
To create a social acceptance was therefore always an enormous challenge. In order to give all these developers and artists a platform and to get into an interdisciplinary exchange with academics, the SampleMusicFestival was born in 2015.
The aim of the the annual symposium of this event is to connect people who are engaged in questions related to contemporary digital performance art: from artists to academics; practitioners to philosophers; followers to fellows.
In 2016, I was lucky enough to collaborate with Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen to present S-notation at the Cambridge University TENOR Music Conference in front of 50 music scholars. Three years later this talk was awarded as one of the best contribution at TENOR by the GMTH which is the association of German-speaking Music Theory.
Going back to the quote by Stockhausen “A musical notation alone is not enough. Turntablism must first and foremost legitimize itself through public relations.”
Our mission with Sample Music Festival is therefore: to establish Turntablism, Finger Drumming, Syntablism, Artablism, Datablism and Controllerism on an academic and public stage. With Theory of Motion it should be possible to learn these new instrumental forms at state music schools and universities based on music theory and the systematic of playing techniques.
This would increase social acceptance and make it easier for many people to turn their passion into a profession. Until then, it is a long way but in 100 years, exactly this idea will be called -classic-!
Since 2012, I have lived in Berlin and have made a living from organizing the Sample Music Festival and SOUNDADD. Beside that I´m working on different music projects and hold lectures. In cooperation with Bob Kruijer and Nicholas Carris, we founded SXRATCH in 2021 – a company manufactures products that unlock new ways of being creative in performance as well as production and educational settings.
In 2022 we have released the Scratch Visualizer which allows scratch DJs to use their DVS vinyl and midi-enabled mixer to view a graphical representation of their vinyl and x-fader movements whilst they practice, analyze the patterns and understand where they can improve! In 2023, we brought on John Carluccio as Creative Director. Carluccio is best known for his documentary project Battle Sounds: Hip-Hop DJ Documentary (1997), and the founder of TTM, Turntablist Transcription Methodology.
