love

It has taken me seven years to try to figure out how to say goodbye to the time and work and joyful collaboration that was Morex Optimo.

I just stumbled over an old video on youtube, cell-phone captured by Anita Schmid, from one of the rehearsal shows for our last tour, with the last lineup of the band.

After all these years, its muddled and distorted audio and obvious missteps reads more like an artifact under layers of dirt and time than a possibly embarrassing exposé of a new line-up trying to find its way through a song. Through this, I find an empathy for that moment, and it feels fitting.

I wish I could also have a similarly fitting way to pay tribute to the inestimable and gracious and warm contributions of both Yuri Weber and Heather Wagner, who founded the band and co-improvised and wrote the material with me, as well as pay thanks to Kerry Kennedy, Jan Haux, and Pierre De Gaillande, who did a lovely job in our final tour reconstructing and reinterpreting the songs with me.

But now, as usual, I’ve said to much. I should have kept it to what I said at 3:59 of the video.

Anita Schmid captured a particularly dark and stormy last version of Big Tongue Man, played at the Luna Lounge, Brooklyn, 2007. Adios.

MOREX OPTIMO from stefan on Vimeo

Thanks to Stefan for taking this snippet from our SoHo in Ottakring show and posting it. What you can’t see in the video are the parents holding their kiddies in the windows to let them dance, and the lovely and incongruous melange of people happily drinking beer. Also, the moon was gorgeous in the cerulean dusk.

The greatest?

It’s The Zimmers Band, starring 90-year-old Alf, from an advance clip of a BBC television documentary made by Tim Samuels to air in May ’07. (This clip was recorded at the Beatles 2 Studio at Abbey Road studios, hence the reenactment of the Abbey Road cover photo.)

Preparing for our new European tour. Wanna watch?

Technorati Tags: morex optimo, rehearsals, tour

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Morex Optimo’s Heather Wagner and Kristofer Widholm are performing in an ambitious re-enactment of The Who’s legendary destructive performance at the Monterey Pop Festival for “Une Questione de Génération” the upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, France, February 15, 2007.

Joining them on bass as John Entwistle is Pierre de Gaillande, frontman for the ever-cool Melomane. Christoph Draeger (the artist behind the performance and installation piece) will be playing the role of Pete Townshend.

In rehearsals for this project, Pierre, Heather, and Kristofer decided to take the opportunity to learn each other’s songs and create an instamatic and disposable band called “Melorex.” Melorex will also be playing a brief Gallic tour.

Technorati Tags: christoph draeger, heather wagner, john entwistle, keith moon, pete townshend, pierre de gaillande, roger daltry, the who

John Cabral has put together one of the more banal approaches to the virtual world I have yet seen. Add to the banality of evil, the banality of all our market-driven drive to render a world we don’t even feel comfortable living in.

animaland home video

Flexible, charismatic, jet-lag lands and streaks of rain the tarmac, the club, the glasses of beer, the nap, the twenty minutes of honey-golden sunlight through Marcel’s living room window. A quiet through sliding wood doors. Heather and Kerry bundled under jackets and comforters that need comforting themselves. * The room comes and goes and is full of people, and then we’re the only ones left, carrying our high-spirits through the air cold with exhaustion. We couldn’t imagine a warmer welcome. You can’t forget, so let’s keep looking at each other. Help me with this song, will you? And you, in the back, thank you for the way you raise your glass when you ask for an encore. Thank you for tripping over cobblestone streets to get here. Thank you for keeping cities like this alive, eating their way down through highways, taverns, churches, and plate tectonics. * This one? I believe we were sharing dairy products on the lawn along the highway between Bern and Lausanne. Yes? No? The jet fighter is at rest-stop. * And what a welcome we get from you, you big old lovely place, with your dadaist oops of history sliced into regularity, Calvinism, and theories of relativity and space-time inconstancy. Sold out at Klub Helsinki, and Room absolutely rocks the entire crowd two or three inches off the floor. We hit the stage running, scrape our knees a little, but the crowd carries us through. * And then there a moments that are just like throwing a stone into water.

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Die gute Stube des Café Kairo statt das Stade de Suisse, New-York-Rock statt Robbie-Williams-Pop: Mit den Bands Morex Optimo (Bild) und Room sind heute Abend Vertreter der innovativen Musikszene des Big Apple zu Gast in Bern.

St. Gallen Tagblatt, Aug 22, 2006

Rorschach/St. Gallen.
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Im Minivan durch Europa
Morex Optimo entstanden im Zuge der Jüngsten Explosion innovativen Rocks aus Brooklyn, fanden aber in keiner ger gängigen Schubladen Platz. In ihrer neusten Version spielt die Band lebendigen, verzwickten Pop. Um den Abgang von Bassist Yuri Weber zu verkraften, verschanzte sich das Kernduo Kristofer Widholm (Gitarre, Gesang) und Heather Wagner (Schalgzeug, Gesang) vergangenen Winter mit dem Produzenten Jay Braun (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mooney Suzuki) im Studio. Braun blieb als Bassist bei Morex Optimo hängen. Das Quartett wird durch die warme Stimme and die knackigen Gitarrenriffs von Kerry Kennedy vervollständigt.

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