HI - Michael Briel here!

[Kruge]

Hi there! I found this forum more or less through sheer luck, but I guess I'm here to stay a while, so there!

Since I'm a pretty lazy guy allow me to introduce myself by posting an old text from my homepage:





The Me

Who am I? Where do I come from? What do I do when I don’t make music? Still interested? Well - read on then...

I was born on the 21st of January 1971 in Sinzig, Germany.

It was during school that I encountered computers for the first time - remember that those were the pre-PC-days... So I learned Basic (and later Pascal) on an Apple IIe - machine. I got bored by programming very soon, but from that moment on I *was* hooked on computers anyway... After all this was something really new in those days... If you’re from a ‘younger’ generation you probably won’t realise that, up to those days in the middle of the 80’s noone even *knew* about computers except from sci-fi movies! Ok, except some government experts perhaps - you know, what I mean!

Of course I had to have one on my own and of course it became a Commodore C64... And of course I very soon got to know the works of such famous game-soundtrack-composers like Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, David Whittacker, Chris Huelsbeck or Martin Gallway, just to name a few... I assume, that those really were my earliest influences, because their work inspired me to try it on my own as well. First I programmed some tracks in C64-Basic (quite an inefficient way to do such a thing, believe me!) and then came the real Genesis: Some German magazine printed the programm-code of Chris Huelsbeck’s SOUND MONITOR, one of the earliest tracker-like programmes freely available...

With this nice piece of software I did my first real steps - not fantastic or ingenious, granted, but my first own compositions... Sadly I’ve only a handful of tunes left from those days, it’s a pity, ‘cause there was some nice material...

I then moved on to the Commodore Amiga - unbelievable! This machine worked with samples and actually was able to produce four channels in stereo - a novelty, for sure! It was also then, when I had my first contact to midi and *real* synthesisers, in this case a Roland MT-32. From that point on, things grew larger and larger - I soon moved to real sequencer-software, got another synth and another one, got a mixer and when it became too small I got a bigger one, then an Atari ST and Cubase and so on...

Today I’m the proud owner of my own small studio, I called “Klinzhai Studio” and I can look back to some nice productions.

At the beginning of my “career” as an artist, I produced a lot of tracks for tape compilations. In the late 80s/early 90s, before anyone was seriously talking about the Internet as a mean of distribution for music (to be more precise - noone talked about the internet at all...), there was a nice, world-wide net of tape artists to which I counted myself. It was ... well, somehow it was “underground” since there you had the chance to meet artists without any major or even a minor contract, it was there where you sent a tape to some guy, preparing a tape-compilation in France to later get Fan mail from Brazil from some other guy who now owned a really noisy copy of a copy of a copy... And it wasn’t about money. Maybe that’s been one of the most important things - you just wanted to have fun, distributing your music through those channels. Of course everyone was dreaming about being discovered, some even did. Some of the bands that I know from the tape days are Sabotage (qu est ce que c’est), Endraum (then “Schaum der Tage”) or Dauerfisch.

After the release of “Brot für die Jugend” ( Kobayashi Maru), I left the tape-scene. Not because I disliked it, but simply, because always was a bit lazy and it was too much trouble to copy tapes and send them around the globe...

It was in early ‘93, that I started to work with Stephan Riess, at first I simply let him use my equipment to produce his own music, but we very soon started to work together. First we called our new project “Wolf 359”, but later we changed it to W359 , perhaps because the Star Trek reference didn’t really work out as a concept...

If you take a look at today’s output in music , you’ll notice that I’m not as productive today as I was some years ago. This has one major reason: Work. Since 1992 I’m managing a shop for computer games (I actually bought it in December ‘98 - so now I’m my own boss) and that, as you might imagine, takes a good part of my time and energy. There even were some days, when I was about to completely quit making music and sell all my equipment, since I wasn’t able to write a thing, but luckily I didn’t...

It was last year, 1998, that I first heard about mp3.com and the possibility to publish my own music via the Internet. This was really cool - actually I felt the spirit of the old tape-days at once. For me, the concept to put my own music into the Internet, available for free downloads, is the logical continuation - money ain’t the most important thing, it’s the distribution of my work, the fact that I don’t just make the stuff for myself and a small group of friends but for *everyone* around the *world* who happens to like it... And this time I don’t even have to copy tapes...

Anyway - this, more or less, is my situation today, and from now on you can look forward to a lot of old music, published in new, never before heard quality as well as really new productions.

About the “project” Michael Briel

Under my own name I publish most of the music that I created myself and that doesn’t “require” to be separated from the rest (as, for example, in the strange stuff that’s found under Doodlebug or the music I did together with Stephan Riess under W359).

The first stuff ever to leave my own four walls was a short track, called “Vengol”, which I recorded for the tape compilation “No Pop, Doch Pop” published by DJ Ottic in the early 90’s.

The next thing was to put up an own tape-“album” with a collection of tracks I had completed then: “So Far”. It featured a wide variety of different styles, even though it was performed only on the MT32 by Roland. The next tape, “Stellar Systems” was similar.

Somewhere in the days before the first tape was out I even was played on WDR, a major German radio station and *boy* - I’ve been proud! It was the track “Chip-A-Gogo” in an early version. At this time I planned to publish my first tape under “Der Mythus des 20ten Jahrhunderts”, a book’s name I’ve found in my grandfather’s library. I thought that the name was cool. Silly me. You can imagine the embarrassment when I had a look *into* the book and found out, what it was about... (actually it was kind of a propaganda-book from Nazi-Germany!). Of course I renamed the tape at once, but when I re-recorded “Chip-A-Gogo” I used the radio announcer’s introduction with the old name anyway.

Soon it could be seen that I, even though I tried not to concentrate on only one genre, I did a lot of music that could be classified as “heavily influenced by Jarre, Oldfield and Tangerine Dream” and since those tracks are the ones that I most like to listen to myself I’ve *then* decided to publish only them under my name and split works from different genres to other projects.

Recently I’ve been a bit more liberal with this ‘rule’, since in these days it seems to be OK to publish music from different genres on only one album (like on Eclypse, which features tracks between ambient and industrial soundscapes). And besides - with me trying more and more new elements and playing around with sounds like I do today it becomes more complicated to find the right genre for each single track...

At this point (written in late April 2000) I started to work on a few new ideas and actually hope to increase my creative output again and publish some new material...

Untill then - I’m glad, that you took as much interest in my music to read all this, thank you and have a good life.

Michael Briel, April 2000

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[Michael Chocholak]

Well your mp3 page is going to keep me busy for a while . A lot to hear & good variety too. Listening to Kobayashi Maru this time.

Interesting that there have been some recent topics mentioning both the C64 as well as the K7/mailart/independent music movements of the 80's & 90's. I've started checking out the folks I knew back then too see how they are doing on the web and have found they are still doing cool works. The synchronicity of the multiverse is apparently alive and well.

[mosc]