dER – Desperate With Standards (Official Audio)
Desperate With Standards is the result of working alone in a field that implicitly demands collectivity. The absence of a live guitarist is not circumstantial but structural: this music does not accommodate comfort, routine fluency, or stylistic certainty. What enters the work does so because it can withstand exposure, not because it fulfills a role.
The piece opens with a voice fragment by Jonas Mekas. This voice does not narrate or authorize the work. It occupies it. The words are not interpreted; they are allowed to stand over the image, including an image from the artist’s own adolescence. The dissonance between voice, image, and authorship is intentional. Personal history is not explained or reclaimed—it is placed under an external gaze.
Improvisation is used here not as an aesthetic preference but as a filtering mechanism. Keyboard, bass, drums, and guitar operate without assigned functions. Harmony, melody, and rhythm are permitted only when they do not stabilize the work. Continuity is treated with suspicion; interruption is allowed to remain unresolved.
Short guitar fragments by Adrian Belew appear not as collaboration or quotation, but as residue. They originate from an improvised workshop, detached from any specific composition. Their inclusion is neither tribute nor reference; it reflects an alignment of method rather than lineage.
The visual material draws from the work of Anselm Kiefer and from Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit (Wim Wenders, 2023). These images were not created for the music, nor does the music seek to serve them. The relationship is not illustrative. Sound and image coexist without negotiating meaning, occasionally reinforcing each other, more often resisting alignment.
Rather than integrating disciplines, Desperate With Standards exposes their incompatibilities. It rejects the expectation that intuition must resolve into coherence, or that personal material must be rendered transparent. The work insists on friction—between intention and outcome, presence and authorship, sound and image.
This is not a work designed for circulation. Its placement on an open platform does not signal accessibility, but necessity. The piece exists as it is: unresolved, unoptimized, and resistant to explanation.
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