A Million Mercies: Electrictric

What is house music? By definition, it is a musical gathering of the family, a ritual and a communal experience. If we ask music enthusiasts from Munich and deep into the Bavarian hinterland, the answer is different: Hausmusik is a legendary record label, a mail order company, an artists’ association, a creative explosion, a musical attitude to life, a big slice of one’s youth or the epitome of subculture. For others, Hausmusik is a music distributor that went bankrupt at some point - so what? The house music we are talking about today is all of these things in four phases. Its turbulent history begins in 1991 and ends several times. And yet Hausmusik is still here. Again and again - and we are celebrating this today with A Million Mercies by Hausmusik founder Wolfgang Petters. This project is one of the nuclei of the label. Originally conceived as a solo project, he repeatedly collaborated with musicians from a wide variety of backgrounds on recordings and concerts. This rarely resulted in anything that could be pigeonholed. They preferred to indulge in the diversity of forms.

For the presentation of the album Electrictric, the project grows into a 13-piece ensemble, a kind of family reunion of the current house musicians. The ensemble’s current line-up includes bands such as the Moulinettes, Sound of Money, Tied and Tickled Trio, Hochzeitskapelle, Carlo Fashion, Fred is dead and many more. There are also eternal companions such as the writer Franz Dobler or the Landsberg filmmaker Ricardo Molina - and always new family members. This will be a family festival of the better kind!
And it revolves around a concept album that will be performed here. Electrictric is about sleep. It’s about dreaming, nightmares or not being able to sleep and also about eternal sleep. Musically, the work elegantly strolls along the boundaries of song, jazz, chamber music and sound experiments. It is sung in German and English.

The performance of Electrictric is designed like a play and combines different forms of performance. Readings, music and film recordings merge, dissolve and open new doors.

Photo: Ricardo Molina

Photo: Ricardo Molina

Photo: Ricardo Molina

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