ABOUT
Born in West Germany, Peter Haeder’s European avant-garde style has led him to experiment with a wide range of musical forms. Solo guitar work alternates with performances of vocal chanting and collaborations with electric improvisational groups Nexus and Theta State and most recently the Navara-Phaeder collaboration with renown Trombonist Ross Hurley. In 1992 Peter formed his own group, Fire-Circle, which combines jazz and flamenco on an eastern rhythmic base. From explorations in Tibetan, Balinese and Arabian music, Peter has developed a feel for the odd-numbered patterns like fifths, sevenths, ninths, eleventh.
Peter under the synonym Phaeder is a prolific multi instrumentalist who also commands the world, dance, techno and drum & bass styles of electronic music. He studied Performance Art with Prof. Harry Kramer at the prestigious Art Academy in Kassel where he began to experiment with musical styles and abstract music forms influenced by musicians like John Cage, Lory Anderson and Karl Heinz Stockhausen. This led to him being invited to perform for Germany’s Cultural Minister and being offered stipend by the French cultural attache to study in Paris.
He has worked with New Zealand’s top performance artists to wide acclaim, playing to standing ovations at Womad and Free Tibet.
Phaeder is a long-time Buddhist with a profound mastery of the esoteric one voice chord chant, now only taught at two monasteries in the world. Over the past five years, and much to the amusement of the Tibetan Lamas, he has married this with his German electronic roots, Flamenco and Jazz. Phaeder has released seven albums in seven different genres and a number of collaborations on various record labels. He also made his mark as a composer for successful children TV shows and documentaries. His sound track work is panoramic and visually evocative.
For LOTUS BEAT II Phaeder reaches back to his roots and presents chanting and Tibetan and Sanskrit Mantras on beds of organic drumming, funky bass and sometimes otherworldly guitar and hip-hop to down-beat tempos…
Prolific music journalist/writer Graham Reid writes….
In a recent conversation this German-born Auckland-based guitarist mentioned an album of his I had forgotten about: it was Kling-Klang (on Ode) and at a guess came from some time in the early-to-mid 90s. His mention of it prompted me to get it out again because I had been very taken with it at the time. It was Haeder in a variety of settings from solo, to duets with Steve Garden on percussion and piano, a trio track adding bassist Bob Shepheard, and finally in a quartet with pianist Phil Broadhurst.
Even now the album stands up: Haeder’s guitars and deep voiced chanting (he is a longtime Buddhist) made for an album that was very different in New Zealand music at the time: not jazz entirely but in that zone.
Haeder — who sometimes performs under the more enigmatic name Phaeder — really fits nowhere in New Zealand contemporary music.
If Kling-Klang could be described as loosely improvised/experimental, then Lotus Beat in 2002 was dance-floor electronica with Buddhist overtones.
Then last year came two albums released simultaneously and which were featured on Elsewhere: the gentle but probing acoustic guitar album Emerald, and its companion Singularity which was Buddhist chants alongside gentle prog-rock electronics.
It came after an intense meditation retreat in South India where he recorded the chants which are woven through the tracks. Haeder is perhaps best described as avantgarde — but in New Zealand that often means someone working independently and in the absence of any guides or followers. Haeder is certainly doing that. It makes him unique but also, given the connections his work has, part of a global musical culture rather than a specifically local one.
Recently he has posted some internet-only material on his website which are little short of cut-up cosmic trips of treated vocals, synth beats and guitars, and astral-jazz attitude. Think avant-jazz from an alternative nightclub on Saturn. They are exceptional, challenging and beguiling, and they here: http://www.phaeder.com/
There are few musicians anywhere who have such mastery of acoustic guitar, electronica, beats and Buddhism, not to mention the interplanetary flights of his internet work now posted.
I bring the eclectic Peter Haeder to your attention again because he and his music truly embody the spirit of