Tracks:

1. 1.Ten Days In March (15:21 min)
   

    Part 1 - Impact

    Part 2 - Passing the Crime Scene

    Part 3 - Invasion

    Part 4 - Funeral

2. 2.Two Weeks in September (5:55 min)
   

    Part 1 - Art Talk

    Part 2 - Job Talk

Musicians:

Hans Hess:  keyboards, drums, vocal effects

Axel Zabel:  electric guitar

Thommy Frank:  acoustic guitar

Kai Heyrock:  bass guitar

Stefan Dittmar:  drums

Markus Roth:  hammond L-122 organ

Chris Grundmann:  synth solos

Click here to download some excerpts.

After having finished TALES FROM THE DAM, I listened to some albums of Porcupine Tree and Rammstein. This was in late 2008 and early 2009. I thought about recording a new album with material influenced more by those artists than by Yes or Mike Oldfield. I was just about to start when my hometown was hit by that horrible school rampage on March 11th, 2009 when 16 people died.

Some months went by without spending a thought about recording new music. Then, everytime I tried to start something the feeling was sad and dark and I felt the incident in every note I played. So I decided to do one track about these 10 days in march 2009 to get rid of these feelings and to be able to feel free and positive again when making music. „Ten days in March“ is about the 10 days after the shooting, when my little hometown first was paralised and shocked, then had to face worldwide press invasion. Pickup trucks with paparazzi on board drove to the graveyard wall so they could take pictures of the funerals and so on. This is not Los Angeles, we were not prepared for the mass media vultures doing business while people are burying their sons and daughters.

The title track of the EP shows what I felt being confronted with all that from the day it happened to the official funeral ceremony ten days later.

I recorded one more track for the never finished album in late 2009. This is about the conversations with painter Herbert Wanderer who became a friend of mine and allowed me to use some of his works for my album artworks (TIMANFAYA and BACKDROP). We met on holiday in Croatia in September 2009, travelled 2 weeks together and spent some evenings talking about life, exchanging experiences, drinking some glasses of local wine and so on, it was an interesting and joyful time. The first part of the track was initially called „art talk“, the second one „job talk“. Listen to it and you know why it sounds like it sounds. ;-)

Well, the album never was finished because Mike Oldfield released some of his early works in remixed and remastered form and gave me the inspiration to record BACKDROP, a much more positive and affirmative piece of music than the two tracks of this EP. But I spent a lot of time and effort to make those tracks and some really good musicians are playing on it so I decided to release it as a download version after the BACKDROP album is out. The title track already has been released with different mastering on THE HAITI PROJEKT in 2010.

Thanks for listening,

hans