Performed and recorded by Karlheinz Essl on 14 Jan 2009 at Studio kHz.

Having played the electric guitar as a rock-obsessed teenager, I re-discovered it 25 years later. In the meantime, I have studied composition and musicology and became heavily involved with electronic and computer music. Working as a composer writing complex musical scores I felt more and more the desire to re-connect to those ecstatic times when I was performing on stage with my electric guitar. But first I developed my own idiosyncratic electronic instrument called m@ze°2 (1998 ff.) which I am still using for free improvisation and live performances.

In 2007, I was ready for another change when the handling with MIDI controllers, graphic tablets, keyboards, computer mouses and pedals became more and more insufficient. I was seeking for an instantaneous, tactile input device to be included into my live-electronic setup. First I was thinking of a custom-made wooden resonance box equipped with strings, contact microphones and pickups that could be plucked, bowed, beaten and scratched. As such a device had to be constructed first (and I am not really good at tinkering) I suddenly realized that a common electric guitar already fulfilled most of my requirements. So I bought myself a Steinberger electric guitar — the most compressed instrument of its kind — and started to study the almost forgotten playing techniques again.

Fortunately, as the body obviously has a strong memory, I got back very quickly to the status of playing that I had 25 years ago. However, meanwhile my musical mind has completely changed: Not being primarily interested in re-adapting those powerful rock clichés, I tried to develop a fresh view onto the electric guitar. First of all I decided not to use a plectrum at all and to develop a personal finger-picking technique which incorporates several elements that I used when playing the double bass. Then I discovered the possibilities of an E-Bow, which serves as a wonderful substitution for the standard bow. Later I became familiar with tapping technique and the use of a volume pedal in order to shape the envelope of the sound.

With these achievements, I wrote a piece for electric guitar and live-electronics in the beginning 2008 as part of my Sequitur project. This cycle advertently relates to the famous "Sequenze" of Luciano Berio as an attempt to write a series of pieces which take advantage of the idiosyncratic instrumental possibilities - and confront them with a realtime sound processing environment that has its own secret life.

Info: http://www.essl.at/works/sequitur/sequitur-8.html