Ah, nostalgia. 72 Minutes of Fame is the first album I released after I became completely freelance. No job, no need to wake up to go somewhere, freedom. Well, sort of. This was the first album I physically published and shipped myself. It was a lot of hard work and I was definitely not very good at it, ha!
Alright, why don’t you start listening to this album while I narrate it to you. Imagine a thick german accent. Let’s go.
I’ve always had the urge to make an album that is just purely meant to dance on. My experience wasn’t particularly great, so 72 Minutes represents my attempt to learn how to make house music. I personally don’t know if I succeeded. It’s definitely fascinatingly experimental.
There’s a song that lasts around 15 minutes and keeps changing pace, that’s “From the Window”, “Along the Busiest of Roads” and “Welcome Back to the Machine”. I mean, it technically is one song. When I made it, it was just one project file.
There’s a poem about working and death, called “Alive”. My mental headspace at that time was obviously me quitting my job, and being scared sh*tless doing it. Freelance composer IS a job, but it’s more often than not a very unlucrative job, and I did have a sort of cushy gig as an assembly person in a factory. It was boring, but I had money. And then I just decided to print out the letter of resignation and walked away. Scary back then, a no brainer to me now.
There’s an orchestral arrangement for nothing in particular at the end of the album. Called “Stilbruch”. I think I created it because I was totally into the idea of minimalism in real physical arrangements. I mean, I also bought a ton of new sample libraries and needed to try them out.
My brother was also into the idea of buildups that are unexpected and lead into nothing. Kind of annoy everyone, but then drop the bomb. You can hear a lot of that in “You Have to Cut the Dope”.
72 Minutes of Fame stands for the feeling I’ve had that I was known as a one trick pony at the time. I made Minecraft music and that was all I was good at. I mean, of course not, I am a very eclectic composer and a lot of my albums are crazy varied. Also nobody ever told me such a thing. I just had this premonition that this is the case and I was all intent to prove that specific nobody as much wrong as I possibly can.
In that I succeded. 72 Minutes is not Minecraft, lol.
