Werner Pirchner – the Zappa from Tyrol | MON | 13 03 2023 | 9:45

March 13, 2023 at 9:45 am

The life and work of Werner Pirchner, Ina Regen, Alex Rehak and Crack Ignaz & Young Krillin are documented in 4 parts. The Poplexikon with more than 100 entries can be found at oe1.orf.at/lexika, from A for Ambros to Y for Yung Hurn.

The Tyrolean musician Werner Pirchner, who died in 2001, was unique: an unorthodox composer between jazz, contemporary sounds and folk music, an important jazz vibraphonist and above all the creator of a record with the strange title “Half a Double Album”. When this work appeared in 1973, it caused a sensation: nothing like this had ever been heard in this country. It wasn’t rock, it wasn’t jazz, it wasn’t contemporary music. And yet trace elements from all these genres were found in ever-changing mixing ratios and ludicrous crossings on this record, which was quickly compared to another grand master of musical iconoclamus: the American Frank Zappa, who acted at regarding the same time and produced similarly frivolous sound mixtures.

And just like with the early Zappa, social criticism was also a strong impulse for Werner Pirchner. Except that it wasn’t regarding Vietnam or the hippie movement, but regarding the Tyrolean marksmen, soul-searching and crazy avant-garde yodellers. Werner Pirchner later produced a lot of things between jazz and new music and designed, for example, the Ö1 signations, which were then played for years. But the “half a double album” is, even from today’s point of view, a musical lighthouse that breathed a completely new spirit into the conservative protest song of the post-1968 era and missed a radical aesthetic that has lost none of its charm to this day.
Design: Thomas Miessgang

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