Hi there




Hi - I sort of match the name of Shortout Kid. I like luke-warm coke from the bottle, hamburgers without pickles, noise, silence, spying from above on sweeping cars cleaning the street, squeeking blackbirds in the winter and the rustling sound of my not to recently maintained central heating. I drive a little red French car, that takes me wherever I might feel like going. I stem from a little Western-European country where the stars shine at night, and where the sun practices a daily routine like anywhere else in the world, nothing special really - at least nothing I lately discovered.

You’ve probably never heard of me before – at least I wouldn’t have, if I were you. I woke up one morning and found myself being on this planet, and it took me quite some time to yawn and brush the sleep out of my eyes, to finally get these to sharpen up a little. I am the genetic mix-up of a young 24 year old and the girl he recently married, whom he met at the local dancing-lessons – a couple closely monitored by their little black dog Philippus or Flippy, who entered the house two years before I did. After freeing myself from this cosy family jacket I hid myself quite some time from the western-wind, that makes trees grow crooked - allowing my back to grow staight instead and to prepare myself for being its righteous match, which I should be about now, challenging it and frolicking on its waves, leaning into it and lending it my hair and the lot of my limbs.


The howitzer




For the past decade I've spent every spare minute of my time designing, building and playing a musical instrument that is now about to emerge into the open. About a generation from now some grandkid of mine will probably refer to this as a ram-jet, a sound-dagger or a chainsaw. I like another name: howitzer, after the canon and it's sound, and being almost an anagram of my first nickname: Horowitz - kind of mockingly after the pianist.

I never planned to build the howitzer. I just never felt too much for locking myself away behind a solid wall of pre-programmed laptops and samplers on stage, or having to hire a drummer and a bass-player and having to instruct them how to play my music live on stage. The howitzer plays my sounds and allows me to make them come out any way i want.


On electronics and a colour palette




I guess I'm the only one ever to like poor mechanical midi-recitals of well-known songs. Especially in former rock songs the strange voices used for transcribing existing three-guitar arrangements into mechanical midi-files seem to work pretty well. The harpsicord has made a true comeback from history, as well as a whole range of windinstruments like the trusty old oboe. And it doesn't sound bad at all.

Over the years I’ve become pretty addicted to the laborious process of meticulously sculpting, arranging and puzzling tracks together, delicately carving sounds, chords, beats and melodies into shape. I once set out to become a painter, at art academy - and it's almost like being back behind the easel: having the colours and layers of pigments grow on top of and seek root into one another, shifting them back and forth untill you don't even know where you started, and have them merge together into one massive picture. And I really have to hold back to not turn all of my tracks into fifteen-minute symphonies - I certainly do not rule out the possibility of me one day doing a one-hour song.


On parabels and a solar system




I like parabels. I found out the songs I really like are songs that contain the whole of the universe – and at the same time make perfect sense to a toddler. I tend to picture each of my songs as a little solar system of its own, started off with a proper big bang, dominated by its own little sun and moon and some nice pack of stars, and with an insignificant little blue marble in the supposed centre with its own little climate and horizons, its own vocabulary and confusion of tongues - with a Divine spirit hovering over the void to divide between the waters and to make the dry land appear - and a purging apocalyps for a finish. No line of mine will ever read in just one way.

I like writing from bizar and extreme positions and perspectives – other than my own. I like twisting angles and views. I like exaggeration and enlargement. I like stretching matter to the point it starts to crack up and shows what it's made of. I like clinical language – I like the sterile, the dry and the guaranteed absence of pointless hysteria. I like pointless hysteria. I like the biology of the psychologist. I like the psychology of biologist. I like the clear vision of the toddler. I like the artificial grid of the philosopher.


On the Academy of Arts, lego and designer couches




I underwent some education at the Academy of Arts I spent my student-hood at. I initially set out to become a painter there – but when I realised I was not so sure about the idea of having my spiritual offspring to match the beauty of designer-couch somewhere or having to sentence it to a non-functional existence as colourful square-shaped stains to spice up some lifeless office wall somewhere I sort of completely dropped the activity as a whole, and started shopping around a little. I inhaled lots of photography and video editing instead - both in a way being kind of paintings' more powerful equivalents, and picked up my skills in these areas.

I had always liked using tools – my mother keeps on telling how I at the age of seven made my father saw planks I found lying around, into bits small enough for my tiny little hands to handle, because I insisted on nailing them onto my various constructions. I worked my way through loads of lego in my pre-teens - at least I would have, if these amounts wouldn't have depended on the variable generosity of my mother, being my main sponsor at the time. So when I stumbled upon a room inside the Academy Building containing an unlimited amount of tools I couldn't resist taking root in there.


On a clogged drainpipe, darwin and a writing tablet




When I'm not safely alone in a studio like at this very moment, I speak like a clogged drainpipe. Like alledgedly in Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Marilyn Monroe en Bruce Willis my brain is mounted upside down – resulting in a dramatically increased ability to speak unfluently, or the ability to twist each word quite interestingly before it getting some lift-off. This quality is also known as stuttering. By the way: don’t sue for mentioning the names of these four famous anchestors: I've never met them in person - their names feature on the internet in sites concerning our breed of mankind. For not holding up conversations too much I at one point started using writing pads in all varietys, one of which I equipped with a horn, and sometimes a webcam. The combination of these characteristics contributed to my nickname: Shortout Kid.


Little history of the blackbox




I always liked building huts. My fathers place usually had a serious amount of wood and boards lying around - and during my childhood I took full advantage, ever improving my constructions. The first really usable cabin I built was inside a little green shed in the garden of my fathers home. I had matured to the age of thirteen or fourteen at the time – and I had just started dreaming about playing guitar, going to Art School and so on. I squatted the shed as a whole - but to make absolutely sure my territory was fenced off properly I built this little room inside - just about the size of a chair, a computer with synth attached, a set of flea-market speakers - and the all important orange electric heater.

In the winters I got so cold in there I would have to wear my old rubber gardening-boots to keep my feet from freezing. I still remember the smell of them melting from the warmth of the heater. I blinded the windows - initially to prevent my family from peaking in, but later on I started to like the intimacy of the darkness inside, and I decided to keep it that way. Since then I grew fond of little cabins. I’ve never worked since in a room more than a couple of feet bigger than the fysical bounderies of my body, extended with the rest of my chair and some electronic equipment. The second cabin of this kind digested about all available space in my very first apartment - but in fact that's more due to the microscopic size of the apartment. I didn't build walls around it, thus almost breaking the definition of cabin - because the little window-less room it was situated also joined the two other parts of the apartment destined for my living: the kitchen and the bed.

The most recent cabin I built is the black box. I built it in a little room in my small fourth-floor based apartment. It’s 6 feet long and 6 feet wide, and also 6 feet high – entirely out of plywood and completely covered in noise-reducing foam – to get the sound inside as dry as possible. Okay its also to not disturb the neighbours too much – as my working hours tend to vary from anywhere past midday to anywhere else pre-midday the next day.