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Works 1

by APi

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1.
APi#1101 03:59
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2.
APi#1102 02:24
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3.
APi#1103 06:05
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4.
APi#1104 04:12
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5.
APi#1105 04:00
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6.
APi#1106 04:50
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7.
APi#1107a 03:21
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about

APi WORKS (11 volumes: 1, 2, 3 to X, plus: with vocals) is a series of music, originally created in the years between 1973 and 1983. The creator, Andreas Pirner (APi deriving from his initial letters), then was living in Berlin. Since his time at college he was co-founder and member of Zelta Zonk, a

local rock music group. They startet out with cover versions and later transitioned to some kind of progessive rock. Their full story is documented at www.zeltazonk.de.

APi - being one of the principal song writers - utilised a Revox A77 tape recorder for his own (passive) music consumption as well as to record own material. This stereo machine allowed to read one channel, and (re)record it to the other, adding extra voices. And vice versa.

Thus one could build up several layers of voices, instruments and whatever. Naturally the quality deteriorated with each step AND once you had overwritten channel one with take #3, your very first recording was definitely gone. So a little discipline was of great help, as were

preplanning and being able to go through some minutes in a row without too obvious mistakes.

APi used this proceeding for about ten years, summing up some 100 tracks on two 10,5" reels, front and rear sides. This sums up to a total of about nine hours of material.

The tapes rested "in peace" (and shelfs) until 2006. The since the '80s unused but still existing A77 was activated to transfer the stuff to a PC, using the software Audacity.

All tracks are basically mono, but since in most times the two last recording resided side by side, some pseudo stereo processing was possible. At that time only minimal restauration work was done using the computer.

Then again another peaceful 12 years awaited the digital tracks, until in 2018 a reworking process began. The PC now had features of a DAW (digital audio workstation), enabling to correct, enhance and kinda finish the tracks. Nearly all of them ...

Fundamentally all tracks got the drums and/or percussions they never had. Additional voices and instrumentations filled the arrangements.

This process took place in on/off phases until spring 2020. Then a second fine tuning round finished the sessions. The tracks are not perfect, some nice little errors blink through once in a while, reminding of the very analogue basics.

The albums are in historic order. Their "creative" names simply reflect the sources: First digit numbers the tape roll, second digit the tape sides, the remaining two the counting. Missing numbers reflect "too strange stuff", a/b suffixes indicate tracks not being parallel on tape

sides 1 and 2.
It was an incredible fun to rediscover own creativity from some dozen years ago AND to remember/rework chords and melodies.

credits

released May 15, 2020

All tracks and artwork created by APi

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all rights reserved

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about

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APi Vollersode, Germany

Making music since age 8, guitar at 15, starting a band (mainly bass). Doing many genres, slightly biased towards prog rock [see www.ZeltaZonk.de].
Created tracks with many instruments to analogue tapes. Digital music editing started in mid 2000s, the DAW in 2018. Tapes got reworked. Since then new tracks are created. Since 2020 he works with co-musicians and publishes them. ... more

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