müller
(Hannover/Germany)

In General

"I didn't know you could sing on a guitar!" That's what the surprised mayor of Golishmanovo (a little town near Tyumen, Siberia) said, after a concert performed by Lothar Müller, Andreas Henze and Thomas Hempel on their 2001 tour of Russia.

The guitarist Lothar Müller plays his instrument as expressive as a singer: his tone, his phrasing, his melodies and stories are of a vocal nature and intensity.

Albi	Andreas	Lothar	Thomas

All this began with the Beatles. Their extraordinary wealth of ideas and inventions influenced müller as well as the "flower power" spirit of the 1970s, combined with Eastern philosophies.

For müller, music is power and spiritual energy. Via Santana, Hendrix and Clapton, the path led to Abercrombie, Scofield and Frisell because jazz offered more expressive possibilities, more space and time. But müller was careful to avoid the classical jazz trio sound and that "now-I'm-playing-jazz feeling", as he puts it. Borders are fluid - or disappear altogether.

müller's music plays with country and rock, sounds and samples, grooves and feelings. With his compositions and way of playing he is entering new grounds, no man's land - even in the arrangement of Luiz Bonfa's classic "Manhã de Carnaval", celebrating as well as disassembling from the original four-quarter into three-quarter time.

The pieces on this CD originated in different ways. "Sometimes a melody just appears. Then a piece is essentially finished in a short time, while others take more time, developing ideas I took notes of years ago."

Lothar Müller refers to himself as an autodidact. "It never occurred to me that what I was looking for could be taught. If somebody would have told me, hey, here you can learn Beatles songs, I'd have been there in a flash." So he taught himself, using a book called "Beatles Complete" and a hi-fi .

Müller started out as a singer in various bands; he began playing solos "because I was the only one in the band who could find notes that sounded right, even if it was only two." Initially a lot of his musicmaking was done listening, feeling, only later by using theory and intellectual comprehension.

For Lothar Müller, sounds and moods are important. He uses a wide range of effect devices (or better: technical means of tone formation) applied in an economic and targeted manner: the wahwah, slide, e-bow, tremolo, sampler, pedal, distortion, feed-back, etc. He focuses on simple, beautiful, often sad melodies, embedded in clear structures with well - rounded grooves and wonderful atmospheres - a musical language that is understood even beyond the Urals.

More infos at LOTHAR MÜLLER

CDs:

Q [kju:] - 2003
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Deutschland hören - 2008

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