Karsten Rodemann

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Karsten Rodemann , better known under the pseudonym Graf Haufen (* 1965 in Berlin ), is a German musician, publicist and activist.

Graf Haufen was a new wave and industrial musician, operator of a cassette label and publisher of fanzines in West Berlin in the early 1980s . From 1984 he was mainly active as a mail art and performance artist , neoist and underground gallery owner, and since the mid-1980s as operator of an off-video store and as a film journalist and producer.

Life

In 1981 Graf Haufen founded the cassette label Graf Haufen Tapes , on which the earliest recordings of the groups Die Tödliche Doris and Soilent Grün (later Die Ärzte ) appeared. In his fanzine Die Katastrophe he reviewed underground music that was released internationally on cassettes. In addition, he recorded his own new wave and industrial music under various pseudonyms and was part of the West Berlin post-punk culture of the early 1980s. Together with Harald Fix (“Hapunkt Fly Socks Fix”, “Sulo”) and Guido Huebner (“The synthetic mixed fabric”) he formed the rock group Hatred of Capitalism , which performed with long, aggressive noise and irritation. Both the Graf Haufen Tapes program , one of the leading cassette labels at the time, and the articles in the catastrophe specialized more clearly in industrial music during this period. Through the industrial scene, Graf Haufen came into contact with the international network of Mail Art and within a short time he became a well-known activist and collector, with contacts also to the subcultural Mail Art scene in East Berlin and the GDR .

Another turning point was his participation, together with Harald Fix , at the 9th neoist Apartment Festival in Ponte Nossa, Italy in 1985. During this time Graf Haufen Tapes became the Artcore Edition , a small publisher and distributor for both experimental music and mail Art editions and neoist publications. The successor to the catastrophe was SMILE , Graf Haufen's version of the multiple neoist magazine, which was published under the same name by different editors around the world. Graf Haufen operated his own version of body art , declared his body as a work of art, documented his presence in places with stickers and tried to sell his body excretions as art objects. He declared his private apartment, under the name Artcore Gallery , to be an exhibition venue and showed, among other things, installations and action painting with organic, rotting materials. In 1986 he was the initiator and, together with Stiletto, the organizer of the Neoist Network's First European Training Camp, the second neoist meeting in Germany, which was held in 1982 in Blalla W. Hallmanns Würzburger Schrebergartenhütte . The event in Berlin, which he erratically called the 64th Neoist Apartment Festival , was "opened" in his apartment. In 1987 he published the book Neoism Now , the most comprehensive anthology of neoist manifestos and writings to date. During this time he studied "Communication Science Basics of Language and Music" and "Media Consulting" at the Technical University of Berlin and was co-operator of the non-commercial Berlin producer gallery Paranorm for two years .

In 1990 Graf Haufen went on an art strike , which had been called for the years 1990-1993 by Stewart Home and the Neoists , among others . Since then he has not been active as an artist or in the art business. The body art and the sometimes extreme physical injury performances of the Viennese actionists and artists like Chris Burden aroused his interest in splatter and exploitation films from 1984 onwards . At first he became a regular customer, then an employee, and later a co-owner of the Berlin off-video library Videodrom, which carries both international film art and off-the-shelf genre films. A mail order business for unusual films and genre products was also incorporated early on. In addition to films on video and later laser discs and DVD, international specialist literature and merchandises were also in the range. Specialized genres such as Asian films, especially anime and Hong Kong cinema, were only popularized in Germany through the Mail Order videodrome. Also in 1988 he co-founded the film magazine Splatting Image , which was initially devoted to splatter cinema and later generally to "suppressed film". As editor and co-author he was involved in a book about the film director Jess Franco . On his initiative, the Videodrom also ran the record store and record label "Raw Musique" for underground techno music between 1994 and 2005 and co-produced Jess Franco's film Tender Flesh .

A selection of Graf Haufen's music from the early 1980s, which was only available in small editions on cassettes on his own label, was re-released in 2004 by the record label Vinyl on Demand in 500 copies under the title Continuity of Sensitivities . This LP is now out of print.

A few years ago, a limited CD-R with the extended re-release of the then C-60 cassette “Rite 64” of the project “Falx Cerebri” by Graf Haufen was released on the label “Korm Plastics”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/deff.htm
  2. ↑ http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book1982Wurzburg.html
  3. ↑ https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/deff.htm
personal data
SURNAME Rodemann, Karsten
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pile, count (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German musician, publicist and activist
DATE OF BIRTH 1965
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin