PNFA

PNFA is the creative audio output of Wolfram Gruss's mind. He was born on July 07.07.1980 in Wasserlos, Bavaria, Germany which is an insignificant 3000 inhabitants village near Frankfurt - the financial centre of Europe and also the place where a person called Andreas Tomalla invented in 1982 the word techno to describe a couple of electronic music styles while working and sorting vinyls in a record store. Right when techno slowly developed into the type of independent music, that it still is these days, Wolfram became incredibly obsessed by the thought of creating his own compositions, after hearing the first releases on the radio. At the age of nine he started taping every bit of electronic music and created his own remixes just with a double cassette recorder. Meanwhile Andreas Tomalla became Talla 2XLC and together with Tillmann Uhrmacher he lead through the Mainz based radio show "Maximal" which was a pioneer project in Germany and the only source for him to listen to this new, exciting underground music. Wolfram spent uncountable hours of listening and taping and labelling the tapes and anxiously waiting for the following Friday evening when the next volume was aired. The only way he could do his own music was by playing on the piano in the house as well as on a half finished organ his dad constructed himself. He loved the sound of it because it just had saw tooth waves and some filter switches which made it almost sound like the rhythmic noises that were aired so rarely at that time. This way he also taught himself how to play the keys.
The popularity of techno increased dramatically soon and it became a fashion to split it up into sub categories like trance or ridiculous sub sub categories like piano trance which is when in 1992 he bought a used Commodore Amiga 500 from a friend for 400 Deutschmarks and on one of the hundreds of 3,5 software inch disks labelled "Amiga Apetizers" a simple composing software was stored. This finally opened up a real possibility for Wolfram to let out the so long collected ideas. His first attempts disappointed him massively though. On the one hand it was of course the fault of 8 bit sound quality and only two stereo channels which he used as 4 mono channels, the limited choice of sounds and the dullness of the software, but on the other hand he would have never expected that it is so much work and so difficult to produce music. Instead of giving it up he became even more crazy about it and bought himself a tiny sound cartridge for his Amiga that allowed him to record his own samples and switched to a tracker software called "Pro Tracker". That was a highly complicated thing because it was only numbers and hexadecimal codes, since these kind of tools were originally created for programmers to add music to computer games. His strong will helped him with ideas of how to get really the best possible sound out of the still little possibilities and soon the first tracks that did not have to hide behind professional productions were recorded on cassettes and spread among his friends as well as given to the DJ of the only disco in the area.
Still being kind of isolated by living in the country, he was 14 when he first learned about affordable real studio equipment. He started working as a paperboy for a whole year saving every penny until he was able to afford his first synthesizer, a Yamaha CS1x - a machine made for techno. Again the limited polyphony and especially the fact that it did not sound like a Roland TB 303 - it was the acid wave at that time - were not quite satisfying. This for he kept going and tweaking and combined it with the beats of his Amiga software creating a huge amount of trance tracks that still do not have to hide.
At the same time techno became too popular and this for nothing special anymore and bored him. Since all of a sudden there was Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers he began experimenting with break- and hiphop beats. After having worked as an assistant gardener in the local hospital during school holidays he also was able to afford a professional Sampler - the Yamaha A3000. It did not have a hard drive so he worked with 3,5 HD disks which was a lot of pain.
In these days he read the novel "Virtual Light" by William Gibson. In some chapter of the book a form of future art is mentioned which is called "Popular Nightmare Folk Art". It depicts all kind of corny sculptures and accessories, that were made of old human corpses. Wolfram suffered at that time from a severe depression of finding his identity and was fascinated by dark stuff anyway. So he adapted this name as his artist name because he thought it totally reflects the darkness and at the same time beauty of his music.
He started painting like a madman at that time, too, which was a way to let out his frustration about feeling misunderstood by friends, who were mostly into Heavy Metal and played in cover bands giving Wolfram the feeling they were superior, because they made music by playing real instruments. So he taught all himself guitar, drums, bass and flutes just to prove a point and continued producing his tracks until the first PNFA album "The Urban Music Box" was born.
To his surprise the track "Past Perfect" became kind of cult in the abandoned contractor's shed that was converted into a meeting point by him and his friends. Naively Wolfram sent out tape demos with handwritten letters to his favourite labels, but never got an answer. In 1997 Grooverider came to Germany and played a drum'n'bass set on the radio that included almost the whole album colours by Adam F. This was as new and exciting to him as techno was back in the early nineties and it just sounded right as the kind of music that should be stamped with PNFA. He began experimenting and producing and the two albums „Popular Nightmare Folk Art“ and “Blaustich“ were born, including custom self made cover artworks which he sold in local second hand record stores and among his friends. He continued using a Commodore Amiga - meanwhile an A1200 equipped with another tracker- software called “Octamed 5.4 Professional” which had 64 midi tracks - until the year 2001 when he did his year of civil service in Bonn, Germany.
The quality he got out of his still simple setup was surprising to everyone since the producers he learned to know in that time all switched to IBM's and "real" production software and machines. So finally he bought himself a PC, too and together with it a copy of Fruity Loops 3. That blew him away. Suddenly there was no more limitation in track numbers, no more latency, no more limitation in sound quality. He was also heavily influenced by Kruder and Dorfmeister as well as Portishead, which is why he tried himself as triphop artist.
"Le Temps Perdu" was born and with it the diversity of styles that can be found on the later album "Meter Fusion".
Suddenly he also had internet and there was mp3.com. Without thinking he would gain any recognition, he just published a couple of tracks. A year later he found himself with almost 100.000 downloads/plays, several first and second prizes for remix contests and on two world wide sold compilations next to artists like Sofa Surfers and Badmarsh and Shri. He published his tracks on more and more portals and sold CDs over them as well as continuing in the local music stores.
In 2001 Wolfram also began his three year apprenticeship for photography in Aschaffenburg, Germany where he met DJ Organi, Flashbaxx and T.Patton among which he also played his first real live gigs in the local youth center Jukuz. After several years of making people move on festivals and in clubs they founded in 2005 the "Sonic Soul Divison" which became a very popular live act always featuring guest instrumentalists, and singers as well as often pairing up with the percussion duo “Royal Opposition”.
Even though Wolfram meanwhile tried almost every professional studio software, such as Cubase or Emagic Logic he always found his way back to Fruity Loops. Probably that is because it was a tracker itself in the beginning of its development. He taught himself everything about dynamics beginning 2003 which gave him lots of new ideas and lead to the album “Popular Abandoned Correspondency”, which was a collaboration with the bass player S|C of Konstrux.de. He became obsessed by tangible frequencies and by creating his own virtual instruments and sounds, always in search for the richest but still clear arrangements.
In 2004 he started studying Media Production in Darmstadt and since he was always a very visual person, too he now focuses a lot on design and film making, but still continues publishing tracks on mp3 portals, compilations and works for labels like Fiberlineaudio.com, MYX Records, Merging Records and D'lectable. He already made tons of remixes and worked out soundtracks for theater plays as well as for the fashion company René Lezard since a couple of years. Page hits and song plays reached 7 digit numbers already and PNFA can be found almost everywhere in the internet. Meanwhile there is no limitation in the genre of electronic music, even though it is mainly aimed for the clubs with a focus on house, nu jazz, breakbeats, triphop and drum'n'bass. Still the PNFA trademark is a deep, brilliant and very often dark sound. To be continued…