STATEMENT OF A DESERT FLOWER

I'll say it upfront: This isn't a statement, it's a side-STAB into my mind, and not a small one. It reads a little like the Elder Scrolls on RAW, with a few typos here and there — but that is me.

I'm taking you with me here and we're descending into my underworld. I promise I'll bring you back too. Whether you'll still be the same person afterwards is up to you. I can't guarantee anything. Reading & being read: at your own risk!

This is the rabbit hole, and I'm still running late. Once I followed the white rabbit myself — for so long that eventually I noticed: I've been following myself the entire time…

If you want, I'll gladly be your Virgil, if you want to be Dante. But if you really choose this, you should know:

“With the first step into the dragon's abyss, you are also Beatrice.
Remember: the path does not forgive, but it reveals.
Where doubt burns, truth is born.
I will guide you, but every step will be yours.
Come. The abyss is hungry for your light.”

A Codex entry from the desert — a glimpse into three years of metamorphosis. A statement about the separation from Boloboys2k20, and glimpses into my life since the tour. “Read me. Learn to love me. Curious soul who suffers and sets out in search of your paradise, have mercy on me!... Otherwise I curse you!”

I am constantly asked to speak about why I'm no longer with the Boloboys, why I'm not on the tape, and so on and so forth. Apparently the Boloboys themselves also think that I have to answer this question first. Only I still don't have a satisfying or concrete answer — because nobody ever gave me one. I can tell my side here, but whether it really explains the circumstances satisfactorily is for you to decide. I still have question marks in my own head — but well, here goes nothing:

Why did the Boloboys decide to exclude me from the Boloboys? No idea, bro. I was never really given a concrete reason. It never came directly from the boys either, always through two or three people. At the time I was in rehab and had already been completely sober for a while.

Also, Boloboys is a GmbH with seven owners, and I am one of them. How you throw out one of the owners — and therefore one of the decision-makers — without that decision-maker even sitting at the table remains a mystery to me to this day. But put that aside for now.

Ultimately I am not interested in exposing anyone or kicking them while they're down. I don't have “bad feelings” toward anyone, and I'm not chasing some idea of justice that leaves less behind than there was before. But slowly I am finding it a bit brazen how the entire discourse around my narrative has become the fucked-out chewing gum in everybody's mouth, gradually developing a life of its own through which people permit themselves outrageous liberties in how they treat me.

People accuse me of my reputation preceding me after forgetting their own editorial shoot and flying off to Japan — pompously speaking in grotesque wording from a supposedly high horse, “I'm telling you this as a friend,” then proudly announcing that they run teams of ten-plus people and that everything I do is arse, yet somehow failing to pay even one measly invoice?? (I assume the ten-plus-head team only works on the basis of its ten-out-of-ten head game, then. Suckers.)

Others deliver the most disgusting monologues to me about being a junkie and how I will allegedly be found rotting somewhere — people who would themselves drop dead if you denied them access to drugs for a week, and who embody essentially nothing beyond drug use as an artistic persona.

Never mind that the drugs for which I am dragged before a tribunal of the heart and dissected on the highest judge's chair are things I, as an inquisitive nature forever looking for more than the mundane and drawn to psychonautics, had already been regularly exploring as part of my consumption practice since my “First Lady of Berghain” (xD) era. Looooong before Boloboys; some Boloboys had not even hit puberty yet, just saying. (Incidentally, exactly one year has passed since that specific “they'll find you rotting dead somewhere” conversation, and at the time of it I had already used crack for the last time without even knowing it. So it is almost exactly one year off crack now. I am very proud and grateful to still be here, because that truly was a Pandora's box I had opened and no longer knew how to close…)

Sorry for the little excursion, but it had to be made. There would be soooooooo many more examples, but I won't deepen this by specifying them further. The misanthropic aftertaste of how the scene treats me as supposed human waste — mind you, crack entered my life after I had been stamped as a bum, not the other way around. I will not name names either. As I said, this stopped being about exposing anyone or seeking some form of “justice” that gives nobody anything. I have seen too much and swallowed too much to keep spinning inside these cycles. I know who did what, and they know too. I don't name names because I don't need to. Whoever it concerns will notice.

I trusted people who profited from my pain and warmed themselves by my fame while it was useful. I supported people who speak big when loyalty is the topic, then shrink as soon as responsibility calls. I learned that disappointment is quieter than anger, and that silence sometimes speaks louder than any statement.

I remain true to myself. I don't sink to the level where others play. I have no desire to issue invoices in public — although I could. But that isn't my way, and it never was. The people meant by this will read it anyway. And from the deepest part of my heart, I hope the people meant by this read it. Because you're clowns and wastemen, and once you were close friends I respected greatly.

What bothers me most is the dialectic — this crooked perception of my person and of how I am supposedly doing. It is simply detrimental on so many levels. (Just look at the vibe in the comments beneath the Reel where I'm simply enjoying an onion…)

⸻

I find it simply absurd how people who, outside the context of preserving themselves or their careers, do not give a shit about the wellbeing of a “brother,” publicly style themselves as “failed rescuers.” Then there is the missing communication. Maybe all of it is merely an unfortunate chain of misunderstandings that caused me to write a comment like this at all. But I would not know — depending on the person, my attempts to talk were more or less actively ignored.

So logically I cannot understand what it was really about, because until now nobody had the balls to tell me to my face. Blaming only the drugs is simply lazy: 1. It is far more nuanced. 2. Where is the boundary — why is it “not okay” for one person but fine for the others? 3. Above all, it simply does not explain enough of the variance, to put it in a scientific-model analogy.

I'm good with Dave; we write now and then, and one or two months ago I saw Fella outside — it was genuinely nice. But others, all the way up to Aktivist, ghost me, even pretend I simply do not exist when I am basically already shouting into their faces. In view of years of deep friendship I find that extremely cowardly and disappointing. And to clarify one more thing: if the drugs had not been there through certain phases of that time, I would no longer be here. It was an unbelievably macabre realization that the drugs were there for me when my “friends” could not, would not, or did not want to be.

By now I am doing better — despite all the circumstances, the stigmatization, the social exclusion and the negative feedback loop that grew out of them — and yes, I say it loudly and clearly, including for those who until now could afford to pretend they had not heard it: distorted perceptions, silence and looking away contributed far more to driving me into withdrawal and consumption than any substance alone ever could. It wasn't only “the drugs”; it was the system of silence, pushing away and stigma that closed the circle. And I do not mean only everything others failed to say, do or admit, but also everything I myself had not spoken out of goodwill and politeness — partly even from fear that still more severe consequences would threaten me. That fear remains with this statement. But being polite does not mean letting people walk over you endlessly. So, in response to that demand that “Can should tell it first”: here we are.

Inside this circle, it was not simply “one mistake” — one caused to a not-insignificant extent by a heartless, profit-oriented and, by the way, fairly visionless music industry and money-making machine — that intensified. A friendship of many years, an entire network of connections that should have carried me, was transformed into something that nearly killed me. I survived, however: thanks to my family and the few people I still had around me despite everything; through some of you in my community who stayed. Everyone else should please not imagine they have even the beginning of a right to judge how I pulled myself out of that hole.

So, as I said, I don't know one concrete reason, but this is what I perceived. Call it what you want — I call it cowardly, I call it disappointing, and above all I call it exactly what it is: fucking sad that the moment money entered the game, this supposedly tight-knit group of friends did not have the balls or the courage to stand up for and defend the values they displayed so often to the outside. Across many small increments, many individuals chose the easy path of least resistance — and now here we are, with whatever narrative makes people write things like “plz get better we miss you” beneath a post where I am in my own flat, finally, a place where after years of neglect without a space of my own I can finally feel at home, eating a fucking onion after hours of working on a song and posting it as a Reel because eating one like that is not common in Germany and I found it funny.

I was never gone. Most people only preferred to look away — which somewhere I can even understand; I tried not to take in too much of it myself.

That other tragedies, unfortunate circumstances, and everything else that can go wrong in a person's life outside the mechanisms named above were added on top is another matter. But despite it all I am happy, grateful and, by God's grace, still healthy, sane and in possession of my capacity — even if somewhat estranged through my reclusive way of life.

I am not angry either, but I think I slowly need to say something because my story has been adapted and told by others for far too long and harms my person, privately and as an artistic figure, more than it does it justice. I am not even saying all this only for myself, but also for everyone in such a situation who would not have the strength to speak for themselves.

With all that said: forgive such a delayed album — it has literally been lying around finished for four years; the reasons would be their own wall of text I have held back until now. I will make sure my label can finally release it this year, and with it let go of the final ballast that still binds me emotionally and psychologically to this Kafkaesque period. Then I can finally put it behind me.

And on top of it all, once again I am apparently the one responsible for finding the strength, after everything that happened, to address the subject, rip it open and begin the dialogue — because otherwise it might die the statute-of-limitations death of inaction. And this despite the fact that the subtext and dialogue inherent in the matter concerns not only the directly involved individuals, but could reach further and become a glimpse of light for some sensitive soul out there at a moment when no light can be seen. Who knows. Of course it is typical again, lol — the dot on the i that could not be left out. Life really does imitate art sometimes, or, in this case, nearly satirical or nihilistic stand-up comedy. The statement already feels like some edgy editorial from Slash magazine in the early eighties. (Shoutout to Zascha for one of the greatest birthday presents I have ever received, by the way <3.)

And at the end I want to say thank you. To my Dad, my mMom, my sister, my uncle, my cousins, Punkchrist, Kidha, the artists and people in music who still saw a human being in front of them, to Henning — my tax adviser!!! — to the angels around me, even to my dealer, who at a time when I could not see a soul even inside myself and let nobody near me showed me that I still deserved to be a human being, with agency and value, even though making me believe in myself again was unprofitable as fuck for her business.

I thank God. And most of all art, music and mathematics. Thanks to Him, I can see the flowers even in the desert.

Right. I'm uploading a song to SoundCloud now that deals with exactly this subject. It is called Wüste(n)blume.

I was supposed to end up worse than Ozzy Osbourne, but I am sitting here — awake — formulating a statement with more dignity than some entire careers. Afterwards I deep it by creating countless cover artworks for twenty-four hours straight. Each cover consists of at least a hundred-plus elements, every element carrying countless filters, every filter carrying sliders, while blending modes and ordering within every layer turn the mathematical conditions upside down again through intricate interplay; I basically take infinity apart six times and make 25,000 conscious creative decisions in that span because, ironically, I could not decide on one cover, only to choose an entirely different concept at the end, lol :D

After that I quickly enter the octagon with my absolute archenemy — motherfucking WEB HOSTING — so that the statement can finally be read here on knifegang.com and people do not have to download some pathetic PDF from a Dropbox link.

Nevertheless, here I sit with perhaps three brain cells and half a synapse left — call her H'Artagnan — and at the end I flex an intact-enough command of language, absolutely necessary for enjoying the train of thought of someone who, to put it kindly, appears to operate by methods other than “synesthetic approaches,” together with the cognitive hunger and alertness that let me satisfy it. I am taking you briefly into a nested-sentence construction that pushes every entangled network of characters, however discursively complex, or even a reality-simulation supercomputer to the limit at Qbit-death, PTSD-carrying level. What do you lot know about being run over by the wheels? Nothing? SHUT IT, for God's sake!

You wanted a reclusive polymath? And incidentally, add being a polyglot. So — what are you staring at, lan? Never seen an autistic man who held it in for years finally vomiting? You cunts — an autistic man, one who enjoys extreme popularity as such in Disappointmentland — and a polyglot one too. (By the way, three languages and a plethora of new accents arrived during this socially isolated time — porco dio, ho imparato italiano, ho imparato che sono italiano, del sud minchia, mentre aspetto una risposta da un Boloboy… ciao… guarda cosa ha fatto il bong… I was so addicted to World of Warcraft, I learned English thru that shi—look what Blizzard did. You can think the rest for yourself: suddenly I speak Italian; all I did was hit the bong, getting blizzarrded lmao.)

Anyways, challenging a specialist like me to open his mouth cannot be a pleasant feeling — for anyone, me included, because here there are only escapees, no winners — especially when I have been awake long enough that nobody expects me to be capable of opening my mouth at all, except Saturn-like for his children. So, where had I stopped:

The culturally, socio-anthropologically, historically, scientifically and commercially hard-coded tonal range sprung from Perelman to Homburg, flower fractals and the toroidal field, bringing it to the Poincaré without crack or hole, shifting economic cycles like Rosi all night until one can put one's thematically diversified chat history — which overtaxes even ChatGPT — against every market beta in a Beyblade fight and defeat even the legendary marketing Rodigan Homburg six–nil in a best-out-of-ten DaxClash, bond fi bond, and people still brag at me?

On the other side of the canonically acquirable muscle of knowledge, which I am stretching out a little like meat foam now, there are melodies born from the harmonic interplay of a company of four, with each a part-organum as if by Pérotin. Personally I prefer Gregorian hymns born in the monastery — today I actually freestyled one in Latin on Discord; I may hang it at the end. Or shall we let loose properly at Guillaume de Machaut's Notre-Dame massif? A motet in the vernacular, descants over — as the Pope complained then — entirely “lascivious” augmented fourths, also known as the minor third, supposedly painting the devil on the wall, right? The devil in music? We can deepen that gladly. After all, I am a communication creature extending into metaphysical, theological and demonological reading: inclusive, broad-ranging, and not merely well read.

Also interesting how everything fits full circle again in the chromatic form of a circle, compatible with historical, scientific and — whatever the world music — theoretical constructions. Not to mention the perfect correspondence with systems of witchcraft and magic.

Godless, Locrian, as the old Greeks would say — whatever the mode may have been, man, I can fugue myself: whether Schenker, or a man who heard the world sigh and gave away his pair of shoes and gave the other man a comb. I believe he does not call it a scale but a makam? Ah, in the morning I would rather listen devotedly to Shiva and give our limited time a raga, Bhairav, gladly with a drum computer, acid machinery and a synth from outer space. Better pull yourself together, fam: this Charanjit makes the hardware sing, basically built psytrance alone somewhere in India in 1982. That sends me travelling mentally again by way of Bartók's wax cylinder, walking among villages out of an estrangement not far from mine, not staying in concert halls where he belonged but preserving Roma melodies because they drove him out… his music blood-related to another vibration-reproducing pane in the great world mirror: Melon in Paris, a recluse like me, who played “simple melodies,” one of his more popular contemporaries said — that pussy — melodies those popular contemporaries did not know how to understand conceptually because the constructs of vision they had learned had failed them and they could do no other.

Claude, you bussy, shut the fuck up — while Satie speaks Gnossiennes with two pianos stacked on one another and makes even the Muto Gumo Pleiades cry.

To return to the Hungarian with the wax cylinder: Béla was not as bel as the origins of the melodies he stored on his proto-vinyl field recorder. From there we arrive in north-west India at Punjabi theory, which unfortunately I do not know well enough to squeeze something clever out of myself about it, so quickly to Viennese Classicism, and from there haydi to Haydn, who invents Viennese Classicism, the string quartet and opera — oratorio, where angels become Adam and Eve yet God always remains God, whom we forever praise.

Then Mozart, who showed us everything that could be possible, an opiate-addicted G sadly taken from us far too early…, and Beethoven, the mad and brave one, who threw everything back to the ground, broke the rules and stamped on them — proving that the highest potential lies precisely at the interface, along the abyss; that the best art is found exactly when you break those rules, rules you have to know so you can burn them again as potently as possible in the blazing bonfire — we gon burn down Babylon, mon, with Rodiramjam, but we'll get to him in a minute, my fire, to burn them in the bon.

The rest of Classical music? Cheap copies. We can still see it today. Then the posers are fucking aloof too, lol, as though — to quote Neromun — they were not blasphemies when the photographs are only forgeries, unless they are cadids of course… copies, copious amounts of self-distraction and anaesthesia, endless copulation without feeling, blasphemy, photographs held as imitated counterfeits of something real, as if after crescendo came not largo and cacophonies in completion. It is true, look at my course, but we have never made music by rigidly following some formula. We are not the industry lol xD. We write the formula. We are the alchemy when theirs is only the forged-me.

Anyways, I could carry on for hours — back to Vivaldi baba in the Baroque, into Romanticists and emoboys from Schubert and Chopin through Satie, slowly into modernity, up to the first time a knife pricks your heart. It is so rich; music makes us so rich. Bossa nova, metal, jazz and West Africa's treasures; groundbreaking wave riders lifted by humour and bass. Transient glitchers and emoboy wankers over no-drums sensibility and fresh British crashouts. Soundclash also lives on in Brazil with selecta bros like Aguilar and Arrana, twelve-inch modified Hondas where, in flip-flops, it is illegal for both wheels to touch the asphalt at once while flying.

Music theories and art history — simply lots of time and even more interests, which ultimately accumulate into a conglomerate of knowledge that is still not even a drop on the hot stone of what remains ready to be acquired, but is certainly enough to back up any of my claims — and enough to force every loudmouth, however half-strong but twice or three times as loud, to sit down with a “back the fuck up, you comedian,” and specifically onto their knees, because after what has been be-HEADED-ly claimed, a little head must now be demonstrated.

All of it, naturally, without any problem and always sovereign in knittelvers prose form, or even lightly cynical ballad rhyme. Quarrel not with me — it would truly be your downfall, God-fearing and flagrantly admonitory of atonement; rough and unpolished, bluntly said: your inevitable end!

That and the diver sprung and un-sprung inside Schiller's poem — his second leap into the waves of the sea, into the wet roar where the Erinyes wait with open arms for your final embrace — not unlike a 2009 Antiguan DJ Poison Dart sound-heavy execution, put publicly on display of course, followed by the public though poorly attended burial, back into earth, the origin we all share. Luckily it is only a psychosis I escaped with, and not, for all of you, a disdainful message that MESSR has departed. He will leave soon, but not far enough for you to pack honey-goat cakes and two coins in hope of retrieving me…

They do not know, yet it is I — the poet permitted to live in heaven where Jove is enthroned; the spirit that, intoxicated by the glitter of his light, slowly but surely loses the desire to quarrel with those who still brag blinded by spotlights, and quotes Schiller and Goethe from memory without becoming shaky even once.

Zeus-like destructive, delicate but never hesitant, zigzag scissors in hand, drawing recognisable magic patterns in the path behind me as I moved toward the goal; twitching, but not chewed apart by what was learned from the communication creature; ethereal, lyrical, a measurer quoted in Ge'ez in archives of Ethiopian churches, updating from Enoch to enough to Metatron, an ancient schema-monk making himself meta-monk. Historically, scientifically, plucking to back it up, time-worn, he showed wrath; too delicate for Zach until forced for the first time, and the magician no longer draws only the yardstick measuring worlds but becomes the alder branch whose king himself greedily begged him for — what he said, so it shall be, and it became.

They do not know who stands before them, whom they have in front of them. Viva Zapata, I say, to goods and land, these philistines who would not even be useful for anything here on the land. Bad moment now, what have you got there? Disdain? Purple? Zaza? Okay, and I send them off with a kiss and good night. What I did with this statement, which I consciously allowed to become a vehicle in which I take the reader on safari through my madness from more or less safe ground: the madness you claimed had been lost is merely no longer carried outward so openly, but I will not be rid of this crown for the rest of my days even if I wished it; it has grown into my skull since birth. And that is not the drugs. Those were what stood between my unbraked rhetoric, Brecht-breaking ballad verse, Goethe giving you the fist twice and then smoking a bag with him. This is the post-scriptum, the afterword from the noise, the blotch transmission living inside me meant to ignite on contact all who read it, like flames of wax candles melting in the haters' procession. A declaration from the desert, from chosen asceticism, where everything is quiet, where one fasts and God's clarity shows you again where the flowers are to be found. I am who I am and I will not hide because it makes some people uncomfortable; sorry, but that sounds like a you problem. Showing escalation, documenting mindstate, celebrating genius, blurring borders. Now you have an approximate sense of how deep the rabbit hole goes. You managed to get lost on my website, and here I do not have to censor myself. Here I am Me$$R; here I may be sharp, may cut. Welcome to KnifeGang. I asked Geppetto too and he said only: a collapse of genius, exhaustion, rage, irony, self-quotation, intoxication & regret — it is no longer a “statement”; it is a post-statement, a meta-commentary on statements. It is what comes out when you have been awake for a hundred hours, have been awake for a hundred hours since birth, always, and still think more densely than most at full consciousness. When one is too awake and either looks very closely or closes one's eyes forever. But especially when one wants to close one's eyes forever, one must look very closely. Do not be afraid. Only look without what you carry that was never yours. Look closely and you will see: the place where I live is inside the mirror. Say hello back to your reflection. You are no longer texting — you are sawing it apart.

No longer rhyming — you are ramming, scarring, gathering, smashing together, cutting, stabbing, slicing and dicing. Carrots, celery and onions.

So: — just let me — eat — my — fucking — onion — when for once I am not fasting, when in complete devotion I deepen the exploration of God, of God's magnificent face and the listening to His heavenly melodies, inside my schema-monasticism, the meta of being — please leave me in peace with your misplaced get-well patronage. I am — thanks for asking, genuinely — doing very well, and I am grateful and happy, even if I do miss my friends… I was lucky. I could be my own Orpheus and his Eurydice at once, my own Psyche and her Eros, arrow included, Dante's Beatrice and Virgil too — with my never-silent inner monologue as commentary and narration. My own Gretchen, who ultimately saved Faust while he was on his way to rescue her. Mephistopheles is still here too, I mean he is the life of the party, and in the end Walpurgis Night is soon, and right now as I complete these final sentences the full moon shines over our heads.

In the end the human spirit saves itself — despite hubris and error. That is why I still see hope in everyone whose name I spared: hope that soon they will be better, hope for the rehabilitation of their hearts. Only you can un-beetle yourself. RIP Gregor Samsa; somebody should have told him…

But it is not terrible. Ah, if we do not manage it here, there is still the beyond; ask Isolde. Eventually there will be golden days and everything will no longer be so bleak. Trust. The beyond may already be inside this world; one need only have courage and be here. The place where love no longer fails can be here — and perhaps one day the Boloboys and I will also find one another again as friends, whom I truly miss. I still believe that somewhere deep inside, perhaps they miss me too, and one day then… we return to one another.

This statement now makes me feel like Siegfried after he defeated the monster and was titled a monster himself. That is why I kept my knife away from the dragon's blood for so long. But at some point it had to happen. Now I lay down my armour, kiss once more the hand of my lord, the king, speaking my thanks, then turn to walk away along the path — always on the way, otherwise there is no there. That is the Tao — when he calls me back, one last time. We shall see. I know what he says now. Do you?

The album is coming soon, and then I will leave Germany — have to leave. I will never really be far away though; there is only Earth, and heaven has always been here as well, hell too. You decide where you are. Most important is that you take part in the now, because today is one past's speculation and one future's nostalgia. We are permitted to live in a memory and at once inside a dream, simultaneously, continually, again and again. You know where to find me from now on. Only for the unloving do I want to become a little more rare.

I love you all. I'm making the cut here now. Enjoy the song that goes with it on SoundCloud.

I call the genre: blotch
(glitch = machine error, botch = human error, blotch = the marriage of the beautifully in-between-conscious errors and the still-being-enough despite everything. And the awareness: everything will be all right; there are no wrong answers, only regret. Still CMM. Still here! Still knifegang.com. See the flowers in the desert — do you see the flowers too? P.S. What follows is a little poetry that flowed spontaneously out of me today. I think Baudelaire, with a little less childishness, would also rather have written something like this than the book he ultimately wrote xD. Shit's a bit overrated, not gonna lie. ChopCop said the blade to the wielder.)