T.T. Thomas Tannenberger hat geschrieben:NACH(T)WORT
(posted here on my personal page since it´s a personal statement, based on our human relation and mundane matters. there is nothing to be added when it comes to the artist - music, lyrics and images said it all - only some words about the man and myself.)
provocatively, I have written “blood (family) and soil (home)” in a previous thread, because I was looking at a kindergarten photo and now pondering for 2 days why our mutual understanding even was a thing, given how fundamentally different lives we led. you bet, driving through the dark backstreets of our old hometown on Monday night while listening to our 90s albums was an experience of almost unbearable intensity.
PK and I grew up in the same small village, Neusiedl/Zaya, and went to the same kindergarten and primary school, although me being one year older resulted in different groups and classes. back in the late 70s early 80s, his mother and my father were colleagues, working in the same local bank. truly, the village was tiny, and some things haven´t changed – during my nightly visit down the town´s cobbled-street end next to the woods, I saw the same ragged fallow, the clay soil with a few clumps of dried grass, the same bent iron rods, placed there long before our birth to serve as goal for the football playing kids of generations. truly, these two rods were already completely rusty even in our childhood. most parts of the village haven´t changed one bit, which is rare these days. the place where we spent our first years has put-on an otherworldly, out-of-time patina from my perspective.
at the age of 10, I moved a few kilometres to the next bigger town – hardly a real city, but for the coming 6 or 7 years, we lost track of each other. our schools were even further apart than our homes, he went to the HTL (secondary school with technical focus) rather towards Waldviertel near the town where Hörnix Studio is located, while I went to a Musikgymnasium (grammar school with focus on music and classical guitar) and before that, made my first steps with a band in Laa/Thaya, Weinviertel´s northernmost border area – with some friends who later collaborated with him and ABIGOR, too. So there was always common ground even when we didn´t team up in those years. soon we started to go out on weekends at the turning of the 80s to 90s, and he suddenly surfaced in Mistelbach. after one of the first proper evenings of teenage drunkenness, when making a bed for him in the guestroom of my family´s house, he coined the immortal phrase “gebts ma wos zum kodern”, which means “I need something to puke”, as I have learned a few seconds later. listening to the most extreme music, we were enthusiastic about the Death Metal scene of 1990/91, and soon after, Black Metal filled our world 24/7.
There´s a lot to report from these days. soon, a double LP with our demos will be released, the booklet describing the times in detail, while another project is long in the making - a book, initiated in France hopefully released in not-too-distant future, where ABIGOR´s background and the 90s are getting thoroughly discussed. so what about him, the guy, not the artist.
I have mentioned our early upbringing because whatever you may think about blood (loosely, the idiosyncrasy of people with the same local roots) and soil (one´s immediate home, again thought in a very small radius), an ill-termed and almost forbidden concept after the Third Reich, but something in our common childhood of late 1970s northern Austria must have been there influencing us profoundly. not far from the Iron Curtain, surrounded by fields, woods, hollow-ways, soft hills and small oil pumps moving their heads up and down in slow motion like relics of a long bygone era. despite the early 90s, when we spent all the time we could together, sometimes already meeting in the morning and instead of school, tinkering flyers and covers with those rub letter sets, still, during later life we weren´t that kind of friends who called each other, “what´s up, let´s meet for a beer tonight”. not at all. we developed in fundamentally different directions. taste, daily life, world view, life design, it could hardly be more different. nevertheless, when he entered through the doors of my flat, whenever we met, the nodding of the head, a smile, a look, everything was clear instantly. it felt like home and total understanding. you make friends and have to nurture friendships, you meet and choose people since they fit to your character, that´s one thing. but then there´s another form, a connection which could often be held at far distance in your daily reality, yet it clicks whenever the two spheres enter a certain proximity. this was the case. something you rather describe with the word “family” or “home”, and which I can´t trace back to anything else than to our earliest childhood, the things we smelled, saw, heard, and the ground our feet touched and our skinned knees often stained red. mutual understanding because of something within us, a heritage of a certain place and time, like “terroir” forms a wine. nothing which was actively established or fostered.
we also knew about a certain shadow lurking behind us ever since our childhood, and the darkness which we actively searched for and later passionately chased. especially in the past 20 years, the lyrics I have written dealt with the devil, the sinister and the beyond, but I never wrote about the reaper, since I know he definitely comes when you call him. we have witnessed it a few times in the scene – Dead, Euronymous, It, Jon Nödtveidt and so on. call his name often enough, he will answer. yet in the 90s we teased, summoned and called, and stood on the edge many times. death was no stranger to us. although he always knew him better.
PK was introverted and extremely impulsive. already during the recording of the first ABIGOR demo, he threw his guitar against the box and furiously ran up the stairs, stormed out of the cellar heading home, and I had to finish recording his parts. in a less aggressive way, this situation repeated itself in the studio many times, when he was blocked at a certain part and angrily handed over the guitar, “spü du!” (“you play that!”). he often called it a day and easily threw things away, partly because he could rely on me picking up the pieces again, and of course the other way round, especially when I lost my way during the late 90s. but 1993 and 1994 was a carefree, incredible and almost indescribable time that´s still vivid in my memory and heart. at one point back then, when he announced to sacrifice something light-heartedly, probably again quitting the band (which in deed was not a rare thing), I got so angry that I ripped apart the flyers which we just had handcrafted – prototypes to those later printed on Verwüstung and Orkblut, with Euronymous and Dead´s face - and dramatically sent him the cut pieces in an envelope, accompanied by some no less dramatic words. this always worked. the fastest reaction to bring him back to normal was when I didn´t soothe his demon or try to defend something or calm him down, but when I got enraged and mad myself - then he was instantly, within the same moment, regretting his own faux pas, as if I had no reason to lose my temper in the first place. apologies were unuttered, no words necessary, I knew alone from his grunt or a look that things were ok – for a while at least. many things changed during the later 90s and early 00s, but not this habit. at one point between Time and Leytmotif Luzifer, out of the blue, he ended ABIGOR with a drastic thread on facebook. when I opened social media and saw it, I almost got a heart attack. but this was normal when you dealt with him. I called or wrote to him and trumped his negativity or took over command, and things were instantly fine. of course, almost every album was “the last one”.
he was extremely generous, the opposite of a materialist. the monetary value of a piece didn´t mean anything to him, at least when he handed precious items over to me, back then just as last week. in 1994 and 95, with his The Art Of Necronomicon fanzine #3, his vision and depth of understanding about content in our scene was more refined than my own. that issue stood the test of time, I often held it in my hands in the past years, admiring what he did there, just as some interviews he gave in the 90s which surpassed mine in retrospect. soon after, in 1996, if I remember right during one of the weekly Gothic Thursday clubs at Bergwerk in Wien, he met a Swedish girl, Lucia, who was the perfect match to this grumpy loner. into Black Metal and a musician herself, feisty in appearance, punching Silenius for fun at first meeting when they all sat around my table in the old flat. over the next 2 decades, he built his family and what I always deemed as his perfect retreat, a house with a beautiful garden, located in the area of our childhood. of course, whatever he built, wherever he went, his shadow twin followed, and you can´t ignore the call of darkness once it reaches a deafening loudness. if I would have to speculate “why now”, I´d guess he reached everything he could, saw everything he imagined to be seen at his horizon. maybe he was persuaded there´s nothing left to be conquered which would suspend his eternal struggle with the world for a while again. home and tribe, artistic success, what´s more to gain in a lifetime. we communicated more often than usual in the past 3 weeks, a new audio interface was bought for him and new recording software was installed on his computer just a few days ago. but probably for the first time, after everything was accomplished with the maturing of his daughters and the achievements with ABIGOR, there was no spot on the map of life so to reshape his lens, the focus this time couldn´t be shifted away from the all-consuming unknown beyond. there were some events in the past few years, some of which would derail most people for sure, there was death and suicides in both our families´ past (although at very different points in time), but I heavily doubt these occurrences were the cause. he always danced on the edge. always. at one point, only the shadow world was left to be explored - that was clear since youth, but maybe the overwhelming certainty was more present and blazing this time. who knows, I´m left with a guess only.
there was an unwritten law between us which I always valued - he accepted everything coming from my side, and I accepted everything coming from his side. the ideal working method. not a single note was rejected. I took whatever he came up with, and although he usually complained, whatever I made of it got released. compare Time Is The Sulphur In The Veins Of The Saint with Höllenzwang, or Taphonomia Aeternitatis with the 4way Split - as a Black Metal band you can´t offer a greater variety in style and sound. this was possible with him, everything could be explored, as long as the result was original and of highest possible quality. repetition was never an option. a person with such mindset is rare or even impossible to find, but with Silenius we found someone who is as adventurous and never backs off the task of searching for new horizons.
there´s a lot to be said about his grumpiness and why things never were good in his view. the first reaction to something I have sent always was disapproval or at best, indifferent to scornful acceptance, yet after a while he admitted the contrary and approved of the quality. what a retarded ritual that was, but we developed numerous over the decades.
he usually got all the praises, at least until recent years when our methods got permeated more and more and my public stage grew, since he stopped giving interviews long ago – I´m writing all lyrics for more than 10 years and engineer our albums, therefore it was of no interest to him reading all the questions concerning these things, even though I tried to push him to answer at least a few sentences. But during most years, people´s logic always was “TT plays the drums, so PK must be the main guitar player, bass player and composer”. I never complained, although I found all these speculations annoying, after all, we didn´t give out details for a reason. ABIGOR should be perceived as unity. vanity between us was unimaginable, competition unknown.
he finished our next 6 song album and added a folder with additional riffs, he handed all the material over to me in June. immediately after Taphonomia, we discussed the sound and character of the next album – as always, a swing of the pendulum in the other direction, one album already determines how the next will be. after the 90s, our working method was always the same. over months, he collected ideas, then handed over all the files to me, and then it was my turn. given I have all his material here, there will be a new ABIGOR release in 2025 which is fully in line with this method, his presence fully intact, his eyes will stare from the photo as always, we shot quite a few pictures in the past year. but no matter what, after this, there will never be a similar album again - his ideas always grounded me, anchored my musical madness and chaos, set a frame which I would have never established myself. for every album, he sent at least one or two parts which completely upset me, like, just 3 long notes, almost random and sometimes even with an uplifting appeal in the worst case. I always got enraged then, cursed him and literally shouted at my computer screen “you can´t be fucking serious, are you fucking kidding me”, at that point it was my turn to throw away the guitar - softly. but to no one´s surprise, these parts often came out as one of the best in the end, exactly pushing me to do something different. therefore, even if I would be the best composer of the whole fucking universe and the best guitar player in the world, without him I will never come to the same result again. since no matter how complicated and technical or how simple and primitive, how multi-layered or just riffing along, I always built my house on his ground. this soil is missing and can never be replaced, by no one. because he was one of a kind, for the better and worse, and shaped a part of me to who I am. just like our town and common childhood shaped both of us.
(photos: kindergarten late 70s / one of the trips this year, which were more in number than usual – here without posing for publishing the photo. given my unshaved face at least I wasn´t prepared, but with the scornful smiles and “fuck off” looks representing the light-hearted atmosphere of the “band excursions” which we did several times a year, and which will be sorely missed)
