BIOGRAPHY
ONE-LINER
Canadian electronic music producer Karl Mohr performs his evocative, dynamic, electronic songs with heavy beats, powerful vocal performances, glam swagger, scintillating piano work and dramatic, progressive lyrics.
RECORDING ARTIST
Veteran electronic music guru Karl Mohr grew up in the wilds of northern Ontario, on a wedge of land in Chisholm township, triangulated between Callander Bay, Astorville and Powassan, in what could only be described as 'the Boonies'.
With regular summer forest fires being set by sparks from passing trains, claw traps being set for wolves, buckshot flying aimlessly from trespassing poachers and all manner of wild carnivores leaving the boundaries of the neighbouring Crown game preserve, it's a miracle Karl Mohr is alive at all. Being a young synth-enthusiast aided the dual purpose of surviving life in the sticks, and developing early skills as a composer, engineer, producer.
Many Canadians will back up the claim that this is where the real magic of the country happens - in the middle of nowhere. With very little money and long buggy summers, Mohr's teenage years were tuned to junk audio electronics, borrowed synthesizers, piano practicing, vinyl procuring and Commodore 64 programming.
Mohr's rejection of mainstream pop music began at age nine, with a trip to Germany where he saw his first music video, Visage's "Fade to Grey"; the boundaries of his musical imagination were smashed utterly upon the first hearing of Skinny Puppy's "Bites" album. His rigorous piano training added a classical dimension to his alternative/industrial interests as he pursued the appropriate renderings of Bach, Chopin and Debussy. (Karl's formal studies ended in 1992 with Michel Szczesniak.)
Since 1987, Karl Mohr has been composing and recording music, the majority of which has been experimental and electronic. During his BMus degree at Queen's, Kingston, Mohr specialized in electroacoustic composition and piano performance, where he took the boundaries of musical genre to task, merging styles and periods to the extremes of an entire sci-fi techno reconstruction of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (1994).
During this period, 1990-1994, Mohr followed, simultaneously, three main musical avenues: serious concert compositions, techno-driven dance music, and avant-punk industrial song structures. With musical diversity as an innate asset, his music since 1994 has been even less predictable.
Having already released 30 cassette albums of his own material, Mohr released his first compact disc in 1997, "The Heck", which rounded up his industrial-techno work, rich with sampling and fast, heavy, electronic beats. Around this time his ambient, atmospheric songs started to take on a darker, more blatantly 'gothic' reference.
An experimental and cinematic compact disc release in 2000, entitled "The End of The Line" featured some dark rock and electronic works, as well as ambient-oriented songs. Then, after the long wait of eight years, 2002 saw the release of Mohr's earlier Vivaldi tribute, "The Four Seasons 2117" on the Interdimensional Industries imprint.
Also in 2002, while living in Vienna, Mohr released the mutant "Magic Christmas" holiday album, as well as the introspective and quirky lo-fi electro record called "Vereinsgasse". Later, relocating back to Toronto, he began to formulate the direction of his live presence, and then re-issued older material, specifically for fans, into a rear-view collection called "Absent Without Leave" (2003).
There were many releases in 2004: a live album, "Vampires In Clubland", with his band the Fallen Angels (Saint Benjamin on keys, Revolution on electric guitar) also featured commissioned remixes of the very gothic extraterrestrial-visitation theme, "Unidentified Flying Object"; the pointedly political and heavy duty retro-wave release "Tools For The Analog Revolution" was an album of new electronic songs; Mohr's chill house project, Blue Visions, also saw its first release with a very smooth and delightful "A Journey Into Chill House" - the nine songs of which were also featured as nightclub background music in the Omni television series Metropia.
In 2006, Mohr conceived a special designated place for his hardcore techno machine-core terrorbeat impulses, and worst, most-paranoid dytopian nightmares: Droid Charge. The first Droid Charge release was "Stamina Music", a caffeine and taurine-fuelled exercise in psychoacoustic sensory-input bombardment with tempi reaching 500 BPM. In controlled experiments, the album proved to create energy manipulation and psychotic reactions in test subjects. Since the recording of this album followed a number of relaxation, hypnotherapy and related ambient projects, the Droid Charge project could be seen as a reflex reaction to these other catatonic musical atmospheres.
The landmark splitting of Karl Mohr Audio-Yo into three separate recording efforts - Blue Visions for commercial house music and chillout, Droid Charge for extreme hardcore techno experiments, and a re-branded Karl Mohr - allowed Karl to continue work on his songwriting, in a more focussed way. He pursues a rich, inviting, art-song positioning, and can resist the temptation to crank up the hi-hats, power up the synthesizers, or process the mix to an edge of its life. The splitting of Karl's musical projects also gave rise to the need for a separate publishing entity, Multibeat Music, and a label headquarters, Multibeat Records.
Mohr is currently shopping a significant Karl Mohr album of dark rock and techno tracks, entitled "Full Moon Film". Inspired by the film "Trainspotting", this new release leans more toward the 1970s glam sound and pushes the technical boundaries of digital multitracking. Mohr is also closing the vault on his epic back-catalog by re-mastering and re-releasing some of his older cassette material, and then happily demagnetizing the rest.
Since 1996, Mohr has also been working as an award-winning sound designer. The building of rich, organic, sampler-based worlds in his musical endeavours also translates to evocative sonic environments in audio postproduction for film and video. Conversely, his sound effects collages and finely-honed audio design techniques find their way back into Mohr's music productions as well.
PERFORMANCE ARTIST
From a young age, Karl Mohr learned a natural ease with the stage, through the experience of structured piano recitals and juries. His composition professors at university also encouraged the concert-giving tradition, with diffusions of electroacoustic works - this led to performance art and strange experiments in presenting the compositions.
Mohr's first official concert was Hallowe'en 1991 at a gay biker bar in St. Catharines, Ontario where he ranted nihilist apocayptic eulogies into a flashing strobe light and conjured 'the Doomhole' with drummer Robin Buckley over a cassette-noise backdrop. It took seven years before Mohr began giving anything resembling a "normal" concert of songs.
His performance past was peppered with punk rock rave appearances and odd shows at various bizarre venues. For example, performing generator-powered, free-improv, electro-ambient music, outdoors, for rope-climbing modern dancers under the St Clair Viaduct in Toronto; or feeding clarinet and accordion phrases into Istvan Kantor's looping machines.
It was finally in 2003, that Mohr enlisted keyboardist Saint Benjamin (Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip) and rock guitarist Revolution (Ian Revell) to form the trio now operating as Karl Mohr's band, the Fallen Angels. Briefly, Canadian contemporary-classical opera star the Evil Diva (Kristin Mueller-Heaslip) featured in the Fallen Angels. For 'loud' electronic, beat-oriented shows, Mohr also employs a live computer/MIDI set-up.
This Fallen Angels formation allows darkwave, art song, poetry, techno and rock to coexist on a single setlist. His solo voice and piano appearances have heightened intimacy, emotion and delicacy.
Mohr continues to explore both high and low art, simultaneously, with fanatical rigour, in his on-stage performances.
RECENT DISCOGRAPHY
Tools For The Analog RevolutionVampires In Clubland
Absent Without Leave
BRIEF BAND BIOS
KARL MOHRSince 1987, Mohr has been experimenting with the darker sides of electronic music and releasing compilations of his ground-breaking work on cassette, CD, vinyl and via the internet. File his music most often under: darkwave, electronic, tech-house, ambient, electroacoustic. He runs his own label, Multibeat Records.
His performance history is varied, intermittent and strange: live music for rock-climbing modern dancers, clarinet dueling with Istvan Kantor, punk rock appearances at raves, industrial appearances at ambient evenings, backing up Louise Bak as she fed her pubic hair to audience members on toast, turntabling at folk clubs, goats' toenail shakers and diatribes on the serious concert stage.
With the release of his live CD, "Vampires In Clubland", Mohr re-invented his set as a legitimate electronic show of song-based material. The core of the show is Mohr's voice against a computer-generated track, with additional sounds from an over-driven Yamaha strap-on synth, the exacting keyboard work of Saint Benjamin and electric guitar fury of Revolution.
SAINT BENJAMINBenjamin Mueller-Heaslip has been a composer of new music since 1998, with a focus on small chamber ensembles and voice. He received his training in piano performance and composition at Queen's University. He has been the acting president of the Earshot concert series in Toronto.
He composes, arranges for, conducts, and plays bass guitar in his own compact ensemble, the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra, an acoustic neo-classical group which stages their concerts in bars and grottos. They continue to deliver the ultimate rebellious statement against classism and snobbery in classical music culture.
REVOLUTIONRevolution, aka Ian Revell, studied composition at Queen's University and has performed on the bass guitar in many Kingston-area bands. His particular rock guitar fury fuels the Karl Mohr live experience with monster power chords.
As well as being a visual artist working with mixed-media and photography, Revell is currently engaged in writing for his own rock outfit, Double Eyelid.
