John Watermann

2024 Stock. 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 ten in 1945), irony towards the media, confrontational pictures typical from industrial bands. He created Nightshift, his own label, in Brisbane in 1989 to release his music as cassettes or LPs. Before this point, he had been a painter, photographer, film-maker and worked as a jeweller, among many other things. He also released music under various aliases, including Radio Mull. As he is said to have been recording music from the 1970s on, it is not clear whether his 1990s releases were fresh material or compilation of old stuff – the track ‘Lady In The Radiator’ for instance was recorded in 1984. This is a valid point, since the music on ‘Illusions Of Infinite Bliss’ sounds timely and is hard to associate with any given genre/era, the closest being fellow Australians Graeme Revell’s The Insect Musicians or SPK’s Zamia Lehmanni (both 1986).