dessau

In 1980 I had a chance to move to Nashville, Tennessee to get into punk rock bands down there so I did that and after about a year of being in these Sex Pistoley kinda bands, I had a chance to move to Chicago and I got into a band up there called Stations.   Steve Albini was the bass player & I was the drummer.   So this is pre-Big Black.   This is when he was a freshman at Northwestern University and just a geek from Missoula, Montana.   We did a record with a guy named Martin Hannett, who produced Joy Division and early New Order stuff.   We did that and about the same time he was kinda having some heroin problems, so that record never came out.   So I had a chance to come back down to Nashville.   This was about 83-84 so I kinda played drums in some bands but figured out I wanted to do synthesizers and more of an industrial thing.   Back in 84-85 I just formed a band of my own called Dessau.   It was a city in East Germany where I knew nobody would know the name or how to pronounce it.   It was just so obscure that I felt like it was right for what I was doing.   Then, out of the blue, in about '86 I got a call from Martin Hannett again, just cuz I had kept in touch & he wanted to come to Nashville to vacation and stuff so he came over and he produced our first record--a limited edition EP sort of thing..a 12" we did with him called "Red Languages ".   It did pretty good for what it was--we only pressed 500 so it was a very limited edition.   I don't even have any of it.   I'd love to find it.