En Fin Terrible could have been a breakthrough, but this route was cut off after my departure from TestTube, of whom I was even part of for a few weeks. It did not work out in the end and hardly a day went by without an argument, mainly because the label owner was constantly breaking the rules he had agreed upon and thus no organised work was possible. Letting things behind was no easy decision for me as my involvement came along with the convenience of being able to present my music to a sizable audience (whether they actually listen to what they download is a different story, but something you cannot verify anyway), but in the end leaving the golden cage was rewarded with the satisfying feeling of maintaining one’s independence. This notion of freedom probably was a key factor for En Fin Terrible’s complexity, as there was no longer a reason to care about “consumer friendliness” or increase the odds of getting accepted by a netlabel.

On a technical level there are irregular metrics built around a phrase. Perhaps the equivalent to writing down a thought in its full glory rather than turning it into a strictly formed poem. These phrases themselves, however, are embedded into a rather “traditional” framework, with transpositions, reversals, palindromes, contraction and expansion. Another idea I followed was constant variation and shifting of minor details with each iteration of a phrase: This is analoguous how humans memorise events in their life, the basic idea and its cornerstones are maintained, but details and emphasis is constantly changing, so that over time multiple facets of an event are unveiled. As a whole, events in En Fin Terrible are organised in a thesis – antithesis – synthesis scheme known from sonatas (I keep it at a simple level so laymen can catch a glimpse of my idea). Only that it is applied to any significant sonic event that contributes to the composition’s structure.

The music can be anything from soft and gentle up to harsh and abrasive, depending on the logic behind its progression. This is a parallel to my photography: everything that has a contrastive but somehow balanced structure is worth keeping. Whether a recognisable object is involved (or tonality is maintained) is entirely irrelevant as this is not what makes the difference, but the interaction and spread of contrasts. Dissolving the object may be irritating to those not familiar to this concept, but it happens all the time whenever you are drawing, painting or snapping pictures. You bypass the logical half of your brain to perceive things how they really are, as a undefined mass with endless shades, variations and degrees of events. Ideally this is a coordinated balance between rationality and irrationality, in that the former applies cosmetical corrections to the latter and puts it into a logical context of a whole.

And then, provided you have a sufficient level of imagination and talent, you accidentally produced an artwork of value. Art is the discovery of the unconscious and inexpressible and its transposition to an abstract language as communication offer. Whether the perception of the audience is the same as ours should not matter, because our artwork is what the individual recipient finds in it. We, as the creator of an artwork are not involved in this process, other than providing a vessel for other people’s associations, and thus cannot dictate how the audience has to feel about or judge our work.