Asmus Tietchens...
...has been composing and recording electronic music for over 40 years. His earliest works were released on Germany's Sky label. Cluster (Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius) and Brian Eno are amongst his many collaborators. Over the past 20 years he has quietly become a major force on the world underground electronic music scene. Hugely prolific, there are at least 50 albums to his name.

The Asmus Tietchens home page is www.tietchens.de

Terry Burrows...
...has been musically active for the past 20 years, working in styles that cross the musical spectrum from abstract industrialism to art pop. His multi-instrumental recordings have surfaced under numerous guises, among them Yukio Yung, Jung Analysts and Yoo-Ko, and in The Chrysanthemums/Chrys&themums and Push-Button Pleasure. In the mid-1990s he turned much of his attention to writing, and has since authored over 50 titles, among them some of the world's biggest-selling music tutors.

The Terry Burrows home page is www.terryburrows.com

The "Bride" Series...
... began life as a postal collaboration. Tietchens first made contact with Burrows when looking for information on a number of artists that appeared on a compilation he had put together. Tietchens letter coincided with reviews of two of his albums in Sounds, the UK music weekly, which Burrows noticed, bought and liked. Seeing elements of common ground in their work, he suggested a postal collaboration. Tietchens liked the idea of a collaboration where neither artist would meet, nor even speak. The rules were simple: one would prepare 30 minutes of source material for the other - each would then be completely free to process, cut-up, re-work or multi-track the other person's work in any way he saw fit. While they were considering titles for the album, Burrows came up with Watching the Burning Bridge - Tietchens, misreading the handwriting, interpreted this as Watching the Burning Bride. A perfect accident! The album was released on vinyl in 1986 on the Hamster label, and was well received by the European underground press. Two years later it provided the inspiration, and soundtrack, for a short "arthouse" film by Canadian filmmaker - and award-winning photographer - Mark Mushet.

........

The second volume of the series was a dense solo work by Tietchens - Abfleischung.

Volume three was a solo album by Terry Burrows entitled The Whispering Scale. Released in 1989, this was a series of gently shifting tape loops. A short - three to five seconds - loop of tape was spliced together on Burrows' studio 8-track, and sound was dropped in one track at a time. The piece was then structured at the mixing desk. Burrows says now: "I have two regrets about this album. One was that I didn't keep each of the loops - once I'd mixed a track I just erased the sounds on the master loop and used it again. The mixes were geared towards what would fit on a single LP, but now I'd like to have been able to do a remix and greatly lengthen some of those loops. Secondly, there were two pieces that I couldn't use because they were too long. On one, the source material was derived wholly from random snippets from a Frank Sinatra album (Songs for Young Lovers, I think) which had been digitally processed before being recorded onto the tape loop. The mix was about 25 minutes long and, in my mind, at least - although I haven't heard it for about 15 years - it's one of the darkest things I've ever recorded... or until some of the recent things I've been doing. But now that track's been lost! I have hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes, and my cataloguing system has never been too rigorous. It's hopefully in there somewhere, but it could take weeks, months, years to find... if I could lay my hands on it I would have put it on the CD version".

.......

After a gap of eight years, Burrows and Tietchens finally concluded the series with Burning The Watching Bride. Once again, the rules were simple: they would go back to the original source tapes used on the original LP, but approach the new compositions using the techniques they had developed over the intervening decade. In Tietchens' case, this would mean paring the sound down to it's purest essence; in Burrows' case it meant creating a single multi-layered sound collage using some very basic computer digital audio equipment. This final volume appeared in 1998 on Germany's Disaster Area label.

The Bride Box...
... is joint project of Onoma Research in the UK and Disaster Area Records in Germany. It's a four-CD boxed set comprising the original "Bride" recordings. Each album has been digitally remastered using state-of-the-art renovation technology, and is housed in a card replica of the original sleeve. Proposed release date is late Summer 2006.

You can follow of the progress of this project by revisiting these pages or by checking the Onoma Research "news" page.

Onoma are also in discussions with Mark Mushet on the matter of issuing his film Watching The Burning Bride on DVD.

There are a number of Tietchens/Burrows tracks available at Onoma's free download page.