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Crematron (1993-96)

At some point the name Religious Vision became too silly even for us and did not fit the music anymore, which we planned to produce. This music was planned to be much colder and harder than ever. Not as many sad lovesongs, but a brutal commentary on a brutal world - at least on what we thought to be brutal then, that is macho-music, sweat, steel and war; and certainly, like it had to be in german Industrial-music of the third generation: Auschwitz. So it happened that our band was called Crematron.

This may sound totally stupid and one could wonder, if we were Nazis, but you should not forget, that all this was very consequent, in a way. There were good reasons. Especially this thing with the hardness. I mean, we had been patching nice, interesting sounds and noises into as well as every track we had ever made, and we had been happy especially about the connection of Goth-Pop and strange sound. But people who listened to our music either liked it because of the melodies and such, or did not like it because of the strange sound that did not befit for Gothic music. As you may imagine, that was totally peeving. All these philistines with their conformist taste, that exacly equaled a taste in charts-pop, only kind of hidden under a nonconformist attitude. Against this, and masters of abstract negation which we were, this consequently lead to a certain step: deleting melodies, sounds harder, louder and more wicked than ever.

Lucky us, our sense for music was not as abstract as we were. So the sheer pseudo-hardness we wished to produce did never really appear in our songs. The better tracks we produced as Crematron may be a bit more subtile than the older Religious Vision tracks, exactly because of the tension between our hard attitude and our kind of fine taste. Therefore these tracks happened to be more interesting and less fast moving than our former attempts of catchy tunes.

On that score let's come to the - in my ears - very best song of Crematron, to Elemental Storm [mp3], that kind of forms a transition to Keimbefall. Our singer was not involved, all the music only came from Stefan and me and the singing came from (harrumph!) my humble person, too. This track may show what I wanted to say. There is no melody at all, if you don't want to count the "DooDoot" of the bassline as one. Nonetheless the track is neither only cold nor only hard, but kind of sentimental. Everything else, this song means to me, you can learn under the category [keimbefall].

It may be worth noting, that we did not really manage to create atmosphere without melody very often. Especially myself was (and still is) kind of attached to music that goes through your heart in a way, but without being kitsch. How difficult it was to manage to create such songs, you can explore, if you listen to Mind Trap [mp3] for example, which tried to consist of cold surfaces ala The Klinik, but more and more drifted into sad, warm ambiences. I programmed this track alone sometime because I tried to connect my upcoming interests in techno-music (ambient in this case) and our music, like it was. Unfortunately, if you don't know that, you will not recognize it, I guess. I think I somehow wanted to show my partners, that it is possible to connect Rave-feeling and industrial coldness. Strange.

This Techno-thing was very important for me in this time. I nearly broke with the band, because I spent too much time on Raves and because I liked happiness more than gothic sadness. But at the same time I also wanted to produce even colder and less catchy music than before. A contradiction that was not very easy to handle. As a result of all this we produced Paradies [mp3] which obviously comments on the german Rave-Scene.

There were no official publications of Crematron. Who wants to know more might check out Crematron at mp3.com [ext] which will offer more content in the near future. Furthermore there is Crematron at last.fm [ext] and Crematron at myspace [ext] where you can even become our friend -- totally against all our attitude.