John Watermann
John Watermann is one of Australian least known yet most important electronic musicians. He sadly passed away before many came to know his music. Since his death he has garnered more recognition for his darkly surreal, often abstract work, but remains almost unheard of as a video artist.
John Watermann is one of Australian least known yet most important electronic musicians. He sadly passed away before many came to know his music. Since his death he has garnered more recognition for his darkly surreal, often abstract work, but remains almost unheard of as a video artist.
Ambiguity
1990 release (RARE) ** "John Watermann was one of the truely underground sound and visual artists. In the late eighties his name surfaced out of knowhere, when a double CD was released by Walter Ulbricht in Germany. Starting out in Berlin, Germany, where he was born, as a filmmaker and photographer, he found out that he needed soundtracks for his films. He started composing music in the mid sixties and moved to Australia in the early seventies. Although he was collecting sound equipment, his fir…
Illusions Of Infinite Bliss
2024 Stock. ** 888 hand-numbered copies, it comes with 4-page booklet ** Australian composer born in Germany, John Watermann (1935-2002) composed a special kind of electro-acoustic music infused with a post-industrial aesthetic. His style is characterized by the shortness of tracks, obsessive loops, media samples, treated field recordings and a pervading feeling of menace. His aesthetic blends Cold War freezing climate, claustrophobic movies like Eraserhead, post-Auschwitz memorabilia (he was te…
Calcutta Gas Chamber
John Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber has long been hailed as one of the minor masterpieces of post-industrial sound art, this is the very first edition on N D label. Back in 1990, this German born sound artist had traveled to Calcutta where he stumbled upon a gas chamber that had been closed down just a few years earlier. Watermann explains in the liner notes that the Indian government had numerous policies, both official and clandestine, aimed at population control; and the gas chamber was one…
Babel #1
Rare first edition that includes film-litho insert in addition to the folded two-page front cover insert, with 'Babel #1' the late Australian based composer John Watermann created an engaging world of sonic and natural sounds processed and used in dramatic variations.