Sheba's Dance by Michael Brückner

SHEBA’S DANCE (1994):
To me, this is quite a memorable album for various reasons – for example, it contains some of the best (plus some lesser) tracks from my early work. But in the first place, it’s how it came about which makes it special for me:

At some point in late 1993 – when I was still living in Heidelberg during my professional training as an offset printer – a friend introduced me to one of her friends, a lady who turned out to be a (hobby) belly dancer with a weekly show in a middle eastern restaurant at Stuttgart.

Being openminded and outgoing as people in their early 20s (often) are, we too quickly made friends, and soon the idea of doing a project together came up (I don’t remember who suggested it). In order to enable me to write and record some music for her belly dance show, she introduced me to the basics of middle eastern music, gave me some cassettes with original music from Turkey, Marokko and so on, also sheets with notations of a variety of middle eastern rhythms. Also, she borrowed me her Saz (a middle eastern lute) for a while – and the cool thing about it was that it had a pick-up and could be amplified (and recorded without microphone).

I then started to dive as deep into the matter as I could and also to come up with different tracks, mostly based on some of the middle eastern rhythms she had given to me.
My models were mainly the modern sufi music of Omar Faruk Tekbilek (especially his collaborations with Brian Keane) and the more jazz based music of Rabi Abou Khalil, but also, I guess, oriental tinged prog rock tracks like “In The Trap Of The Gods” by Alan Parsons Project, and similar.
However, it turned out more difficult than we had thought to emulate the right kind of sound – and then there were the middle eastern tuning and scales which, at that point, I couldn’t grasp, and neither could the lady, at least she had no theoretical knowledge which she could teach me.

And so, after a while, we decided to drop the project for the time being – hoping to resume it later, however that never happened: a few month into our acquaintance the lady found herself pregnant (…not from me, I hasten to assure) and decided to call belly dancing a day. Soon after that, we lost sight of each other.

While I was disappointed about the project ending that way, I still liked most of the tracks I had recorded for it – middle eastern sounding or not – and they form the bulk of this album (plus a few additions from some months later, which were in a similar vein). All in all, it’s an atmospheric, colourful and somewhat exotic sonic experience, and certainly among my best early albums – especially the title track still gives me kicks, and I would love to have a proper version performed by real musicians with acoustic instruments one day!

Mentioning that, I also offered that track to a good old friend of mine, guitar player Wolfgang Kornberger, who actually recorded two takes – which we didn’t use at the time, but I still love his inspired (and quite virtuoso) playing!

Another important experience around recording this album was that for the first time, I used an actual synthesizer (as opposed to my sample based Yamaha PSR 2700 entertainer keyboard). It was a Korg M1 that I had borrowed from another friend’s friend (this time both male ;-) ). I used it on quite a few of the tracks on this album, most prominently though in “The Second Veil” which – incidentally – was the first track on which I used sounds that I had programmed myself from scrap, and also one of my earliest ambient tracks (well, the first of which I thought it was really cool…).

HA! – and then those sound effects on “Disco Arab”: I used my vacuum cleaner, “modulating” its sound with moving my hand over the tube, and recording it with a cheap microphone through the same Korg guitar FX rack that I still use today for spicing up my ELKA synthesizer…

Finally, those recordings of the electrified saz - of course, I couldn't play the instrument at all, so let this be my contribution to the punk genre (not that I can really play *any* instrument, actually ;-) ).

Oh, those sweet years of our youth! :-D

P.S. You might have noticed that I didn’t mention the lady’s name – that’s because she wanted to keep it secret, which I respect. And her artist name as a dancer wasn’t “Sheba”. But quite similar… ;-)

Tracklist

1.	Scirocco	2:01

2.	Sheba's Dance	6:00

3.	El Mystif	4:45

4.	Oriental Theme	2:44

5.	Disco Arab	6:41

6.	Like Abou	3:42

7.	Oriental Dance	4:02

8.	The Second Veil	7:33

9.	Like Abou, Too	6:58

10.	Arabian Nightmare	3:43

11.	Sheba's Dance - Take 1 feat. Wolfgang Kornberger (Bonus Track)	6:21

12.	El Mystif - ReMix (Bonus Track)	4:59

13.	Journey Through Kurpfalzistan (Bonus Track)	4:09

14.	E-Saz Rock (Bonus Track)	3:45

15.	Improvi-Saz-ion (Bonus Track)	7:40

Credits

released June 6, 1994

All music by Michael Brückner (keyboards, synth, sampling)

Guitar on track 11 by Wolfgang Kornberger

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