Artist description The Me Who am I? Where do I come from? What do I do when I don’t make music? Still interested? Well - read on then... I was born on the 21st of January 1971 in Sinzig, Germany. It was during school that I encountered computers for the first time - remember that those were the pre-PC-days... So I learned Basic (and later Pascal) on an Apple IIe - machine. I got bored by programming very soon, but from that moment on I *was* hooked on computers anyway... After all this was something really new in those days... If you’re from a ‘younger’ generation you probably won’t realise that, up to those days in the middle of the 80’s noone even *knew* about computers except from sci-fi movies! ;-) Ok, except some government experts perhaps - you know, what I mean! Of course I had to have one on my own and of course it became a Commodore C64... And of course I very soon got to know the works of such famous game-soundtrack-composers like Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, David Whittacker, Chris Huelsbeck or Martin Gallway, just to name a few... I assume, that those really were my earliest influences, because their work inspired me to try it on my own as well. First I programmed some tracks in C64-Basic (quite an inefficient way to do such a thing, believe me!) and then came the real Genesis: Some German magazine printed the programm-code of Chris Huelsbeck’s SOUND MONITOR, one of the earliest tracker-like programmes freely available... With this nice piece of software I did my first real steps - not fantastic or ingenious, granted, but my first own compositions... Sadly I’ve only a handful of tunes left from those days, it’s a pity, ‘cause there was some nice material... I then moved on to the Commodore Amiga - unbelievable! This machine worked with samples and actually was able to produce four channels in stereo - a novelty, for sure! It was also then, when I had my first contact to midi and *real* synthesisers, in this case a Roland MT-32. From that point on, things grew larger and larger - I soon moved to real sequencer-software, got another synth and another one, got a mixer and when it became too small I got a bigger one, then an Atari ST and Cubase and so on... Today I’m the proud owner of my own small studio, I called “Klinzhai Studio” and I can look back to some nice productions. At the beginning of my “career” as an artist, I produced a lot of tracks for tape compilations. In the late 80s/early 90s, before anyone was seriously talking about the Internet as a mean of distribution for music (to be more precise - noone talked about the internet at all...), there was a nice, world-wide net of tape artists to which I counted myself. It was ... well, somehow it was “underground” since there you had the chance to meet artists without any major or even a minor contract, it was there where you sent a tape to some guy, preparing a tape-compilation in France to later get Fan mail from Brazil from some other guy who now owned a really noisy copy of a copy of a copy... ;) And it wasn’t about money. Maybe that’s been one of the most important things - you just wanted to have fun, distributing your music through those channels. Of course everyone was dreaming about being discovered, some even did. Some of the bands that I know from the tape days are Sabotage (qu est ce que c’est), Endraum (then “Schaum der Tage”) or Dauerfisch. After the release of “Brot für die Jugend” ( Kobayashi Maru), I left the tape-scene. Not because I disliked it, but simply, because always was a bit lazy and it was too much trouble to copy tapes and send them around the globe... It was in early ‘93, that I started to work with Stephan Riess, at first I simply let him use my equipment to produce his own music, but we very soon started to work together. First we called our new project “Wolf 359”, but later we changed it to W359 , perhaps because the Star Trek reference didn’t really work out as a concept... If you take a look at today’s output in music , you’ll notice that I’m not as productive today as I was some years ago. This has one major reason: Work. Since 1992 I’m managing a shop for computer games (I actually bought it in December ‘98 - so now I’m my own boss) and that, as you might imagine, takes a good part of my time and energy. There even were some days, when I was about to completely quit making music and sell all my equipment, since I wasn’t able to write a thing, but luckily I didn’t... :) It was last year, 1998, that I first heard about mp3.com and the possibility to publish my own music via the Internet. This was really cool - actually I felt the spirit of the old tape-days at once. For me, the concept to put my own music into the Internet, available for free downloads, is the logical continuation - money ain’t the most important thing, it’s the distribution of my work, the fact that I don’t just make the stuff for myself and a small group of friends but for *everyone* around the *world* who happens to like it... :) And this time I don’t even have to copy tapes... Anyway - this, more or less, is my situation today, and from now on you can look forward to a lot of old music, published in new, never before heard quality as well as really new productions. About the “project” Michael Briel Under my own name I publish most of the music that I created myself and that doesn’t “require” to be separated from the rest (as, for example, in the strange stuff that’s found under Doodlebug or the music I did together with Stephan Riess under W359). The first stuff ever to leave my own four walls was a short track, called “Vengol”, which I recorded for the tape compilation “No Pop, Doch Pop” published by DJ Ottic in the early 90’s. The next thing was to put up an own tape-“album” with a collection of tracks I had completed then: “So Far”. It featured a wide variety of different styles, even though it was performed only on the MT32 by Roland. The next tape, “Stellar Systems” was similar. Somewhere in the days before the first tape was out I even was played on WDR, a major German radio station and *boy* - I’ve been proud! ;-) It was the track “Chip-A-Gogo” in an early version. At this time I planned to publish my first tape under “Der Mythus des 20ten Jahrhunderts”, a book’s name I’ve found in my grandfather’s library. I thought that the name was cool. Silly me. You can imagine the embarrassment when I had a look *into* the book and found out, what it was about... (actually it was kind of a propaganda-book from Nazi-Germany!). Of course I renamed the tape at once, but when I re-recorded “Chip-A-Gogo” I used the radio announcer’s introduction with the old name anyway. Soon it could be seen that I, even though I tried not to concentrate on only one genre, I did a lot of music that could be classified as “heavily influenced by Jarre, Oldfield and Tangerine Dream” and since those tracks are the ones that I most like to listen to myself I’ve *then* decided to publish only them under my name and split works from different genres to other projects. Recently I’ve been a bit more liberal with this ‘rule’, since in these days it seems to be OK to publish music from different genres on only one album (like on Eclypse, which features tracks between ambient and industrial soundscapes). And besides - with me trying more and more new elements and playing around with sounds like I do today it becomes more complicated to find the right genre for each single track...At this point (written in late April 2000) I started to work on a few new ideas and actually hope to increase my creative output again and publish some new material... :)Untill then - I’m glad, that you took as much interest in my music to read all this, thank you and have a good life. :)Michael Briel, April 2000

Music Style Mostly Electronica and Ambient, but sometimes some trance-elements come by as well...

Musical Influences Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Pete Namlook, The Orb, Mouse on Mars, Orbital and lots more...

Similar Artists Tangerine Dream, Pete Namlook and Jarre.

Artist History You can also subscribe to the Arche B newsletter by sending me a mail - that way you'll be informed whenever there's a new upload or a major change in the Arche B homepage!

Group Members Me.

Albums Evolution, Eclypse, Solaris, Deep Space, Dark Ambient Works

Press Reviews RAW42: "michael briel has a number of songs available and i've barely scraped the surface here with his music although i tried to pick tracks of different genres. suffice it to say - he's good. the music is quality in whichever style he chooses and he chooses a lot of them :)easy listening in techno music if there was such a thing as easy listening in techno music... fleetyard is a quiet and unassuming little track that plods along with extremely simple bassline and a slightly progressive drum part. the short looping piano melody adds a sense of speed to an otherwise slow number. don't get me wrong, this is good and very well done. michael knows what he's doing, it's just somewhat lacking in excitement although the description reference to utopia planitia is very cool because we all know jean luc picard is the coolest captain and the enterprise was built at utopia planitia. anyway, fleetyard is a light and airy track, not exciting, just nice. picking up speed and appeal with kernkraftwerk ('98 edit), michael briel introduces more change, more sound and an all out techno approach to music in this killer number. however, it's a weird song in that it's so obviously reliant on the thumping kick but the kick sound itself isn't prominent or heavy enough and i'm not so sure it could really be classified as rave although that's the classification. that aside, this is a cool track nonetheless, especially the digitalized vocoder effects near the end. a very nice robotic touch. the void is like an epic in ambience. it takes almost a minute for the first sound in the song to die out. this number is very slow moving but the melodies that are the mainstay in this composition are interesting and well done. the delay is expertly programmed and once it gets going, the song just sweeps you away with its full sound field. if you're the patient sort, you'll enjoy this grand ambient piece. finally, some music that i'd really consider to be true ambient. although these 2 particular selections of michael briel don't offer much in the way of 'music,' they do offer atmosphere and that's done well. the ambient of der klang seems to be mostly one long song effect strung together, somewhat reminding me of the evolving wave sequences from the old korg wavestation. still, this song really strikes a chord with me even though it really doesn't evolve into anything at all. actively listening to the song, it's fairly tedious but for once, this isn't a bad thing to me. this track would be great for background music, or with visuals. overall, a great 'sonicscape of sounds.' on to more ambience in deep blue, with its trippy/spacey background. this number has more melodic elements, and again, i really like the content and what it does, more than what it doesn't do (which is to have a strong song structure or catchy melodies). liking this type of music is unusual for me and the artist should take that as a compliment. the songs are well put together and flow nicely. if you like ambient, this is certainly worthy of a listen."http://www.nua-tech.com/paddy/mp3selec.shtml: "Michael Briel is an electronic genre-hopper; although a lot of his stuff is quite saccharine and unsophisticated, there's also a lot of skillful & interesting stuff in there. 'The Abyss' is a powerful track: intense horror-film music. Around four minutes in, a brilliant soundscape comes in - huge, bright, imbalanced and terrifying. Not one for Perry Como fans. • 'Jupiter Mission' is trance, in the literal sense of the word - slow and hypnotic. Cool. • 'Laudate' has beeps and booming, textured, echoey beats in the foreground; the background consists of Orb-like minimalist choirs and Vangelis-like synthesiser sweeps. Excellent, Smithers. • "We're Back" is a remix of the cool LFO track off the influential 1991 'Frequencies' album. This remix is worth it; it keeps the 'we are the robots'-type vocals, and adds sonorous clusters of bleepy chimes. • 'Elektro 01' has great bouncy, textured beats (I actually don't know what electro is; but Briel says it's electro so I believe him. It's sort of trancey). Around halfway through, a catchy little bleepy ditty comes in; and a little over a minute before the end, some very old-school, outdated sounds. A good track in an unambitious sort of way. • 'Weltraumlabor' is sort of industrial jungle - harsh, unfriendly German sounds. Nice and soulless."

Location Bonn, -- - Germany

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