New Music By Karlheinz Essl

Performed and recorded by Karlheinz Essl on 14 Jan 2009 at Studio kHz. Having played the electric guitar as a rock-obsessed teenager, I re-discovered it 25 years later. In the meantime, I have studied composition and musicology and became heavily involved with electronic and computer music. Working as a composer writing complex musical scores I felt more and more the desire to re-connect to those ecstatic times when I was performing on stage with my electric guitar. But first I developed my own idiosyncratic electronic instrument called m@ze°2 (1998 ff.) which I am still using for free improvisation and live performances. In 2007, I was ready for another change when the handling with MIDI controllers, graphic tablets, keyboards, computer mouses and pedals became more and more insufficient. I was seeking for an instantaneous, tactile input device to be included into my live-electronic setup. First I was thinking of a custom-made wooden resonance box equipped with strings, contact microphones and pickups that