in 1999, i already had sent out dozens of demo-tapes. emailed as much labels. but, so far, no one was interested in releasing a full EP by me. i had some tracks on compilations - biophilia allstars, irritant. but not a true release yet. so i walked in the otaku record store here in my city, hamburg. i had seen hardy, of fischkopf, working at the container record store before, so i know what he looked like. he ran blut records now, out of the otaku store. i bought a record, i think it was somatix on deadly systems, that just came in, and left. next week i came back with a demo-tape i had recorded for this purpose. i walked up to hardy and said "you are hardy?". he said "yes". i said "you're doing blut records right? i have a demo tape here for your label, with my music". he looked at me with a bit of bewilderment. i gave him the tape. "you are doing this music?" he asked, still a bit sceptical perhaps. i said "yes". a week later again, i came back. he said he had listened to the tape, and wanted to make a vinyl 12" with my music. it would be the last 12" of blut records.
why anti-sedative? i thought, and still do, that pop music serves as a sedative, a mental sedative, that keeps the masses dumb and numb and hinders them from uprising and toppling society and reaching utopia. and i thought hardcore techno was the opposite - that made people rebellios and aggressive, and question everything and be critical, makes them "wake up". this was the story behind the name.
the tracks:
a1 starting up
done this in late 1998. can't really say much about the track. it was the speedcore style i liked around that time. 380 bpm i think. the trick here is that i used a special "effect" on the bassdrum after a few second into the track, that gives it an extra punch, well at least i hope so. the rest is quite noisy. i tried to make the screetching sounds as abrasive for the ears as possible.
a2 flatline
this was actually the 3rd finished track i ever did, or so. i think i was 16 at the time i produced it. the name is nicked from neuromancer, where a "flatline" is mentioned as being the fate of cyberpunks who got killed on cyberspace - and have a flatline of the eeg. a dixie flatline character plays an important part in the book too, a human whose conciousness was transfered to a computer system.
the beginning sounds of the track have been described as weird alarm or rave sounds by others, but the intention is of course, to sound like the eeg going flatline. this effect is repeated in the track.
otherwise, i tried to fit as many noizy sounds into the track as possible. there is a bit of a thing which i called the french hardcore thing, which is a change in rhythm structure after 8 basehits, and then back again.
the track actually clocks both at single and double speed, which might not be so visible at first.
a3 disharmonic
one of my first experiments in just intonation and microtuning, after peter gebert of lux nigra intoduced me to that concept. the main melody is not in a western tuning. i had the idea to turn it into more of a techno-sequence in the middle of the track. the breakbeat was an old break i had, that i tried to make sound more metallic. there is a huge pause towards the end, which i added to use it in a live concept, to make people believe that the track has ended, (or the soundsystem broken down), only to be surprised by the onslaught of beats then.
b1 electrocution
hardy wanted "i am god". but by chance, i gave him the wrong track. electrocution instead. when we talked about it he said that this track fits good too, though, so we kept it. electrocution again is one of my earliest tracks. it was an attempt of me doing "hardcore electro", electro as in electrofunk. the thing was i didn't know much of electro at that point, so it sounded completely different. it is the only track, i think, of that period of my music, which uses a melody, even if only 2 different notes for a few seconds.
dj fishead described it as a weird perversion of new wave or so.
b2 sadstep
the moneymaker! well, not really. but it was the track that crept into sets of other people and bought me my first bigger piece of recognition.
i was mildly ridiculed by my friends, because i used a "two step" (or hardstep) rhythm in this track (the name was actually a nod to that), similiar to the amen, that was a definite "no-go" amongst more serious music listeners at that point. to think that decades later still use amen and two-step without batting an eye seems a bit ironic.
again i'm venturing out of standart western tuning here, as the orchestration is "tuned" way different.
b3 neuromancer remix
and again, one of my earlier tracks. this is a remix of knifehandchop's "neuromancer" track, whom i have known from the #gabber channel on IRC back then. i tried to destroy and cut up the tune as much as possible, and used a very cheap and trashy production on this one. the melody at most parts deliberately plays out of loop and rhytms and is sequenced in the wrong way.
again, this was a track lots of people enjoyed and brought me some praise.
the anti-sedative was received well, and i got some positive reviews for it. the initial pressing run was 500 records, which was not a small run for the experimental scene back then.
it was the record i got my first advance, and the first record contract for. i used the tracks of it a lot in my livesets in the later years.
okay, so that was it. maybe you are interested, and want to check out the sound of it.
http://www.discogs.com/Low-Entropy-Anti-Sedative-EP/release/81340
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