![]() ![]() ![]() When Eothen sent me the record as a MP3 rip from his vinyl copy, I immediately fell in love with it: those heavy drums, Jazzy bass, proggy guitar lines, and Franz Wippel's "world-weary drawl," as Eothen put it perfectly in his liner notes. My parents were part of the 1968 student generation and I remember music like Tangerine Dream, Can, or Klaus Doldinger's Passport playing in our household growing up. I have been on a heavy Krautrock diet in the last years, reading every book and article on the subject I could find, religiously listening to the works of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, Michael Rother, Conny Plank, and all the other 1970's greats. I hadn't heard the album, as I hadn't yet engaged in the Austrian side of Krautrock (and the Paternoster record is really, really obscure), but the topic triggered my interest. I was, let me be perfectly honest, surprised and a little taken aback to learn that you agreed to help Egon on his quest to locate the founding members of Paternoster without ever having heard their album is that correct, Stephan? Then, what exactly swayed you to sign on, if it wasn't the music? ![]() So, we exchanged emails and phone calls, he gave me a few initial points of contact, and I went from there. As I had been on a heavy Krautrock diet, my journalistic hunting instinct got triggered. There, in early 2015, he put the word out that he was looking for someone to get him in contact with obscure Austrian Psych-Rockers Paternoster. I also happen to follow him on Instagram. I have crossed paths with Eothen a couple of times since then for example, at the Red Bull Music Academy, which we were both affiliated with. I have to admit, Madlib, Dilla, and DOOM were my musical heroes back then, and they shaped the way I perceived Hip-Hop. It was a promotional tour for Quasimoto's second album. ![]() I also went digging with them through Hamburg's second-hand record stores. Back in 2005, I met him and Madlib in Hamburg for interviews. I've been knowing Eothen loosely for more than 10 years. How did you initially become involved with Egon's long-overdue, band-sanctioned Now-Again Reserve re-master and comprehensive re-issue of Paternoster's coveted $10,000+ 1972 debut? This ultimately, led to me running my own radio show on German web radio station Byte FM and also working on this Paternoster re-issue with Eothen. My main focus had always been Hip-Hop, Urban, and Electronic music, but from there, it naturally turned into a love for the music that was sampled a lot: Jazz, soundtracks, so called "world music," and Krautrock. My musical interests have shifted in the last years. I also did project management for Red Bull and recently started working as a Channel Manager at VICE. A couple of years ago, I left and founded the artist management company and independent label Heart Working Class with my wife, who had been a freelance music publicist for years. For six years (exactly 50 issues), I was the Editor-In-Chief of Juice Magazine, which is Europe's biggest Hip-Hop print publication. Yeah, I've been a music journalist for nearly 15 years. First off, would you care to debrief my readers and I on your professional background, business dealings, and current affiliations? With that said, in light of Now-Again's recently-announced super-deluxe Reserve Edition: Paternoster HIT+RUN-assisted re-issue, I myself reached out to Szillus on Twitter, who, to my delight, was very eager to talk about his involvement with the first Paternoster-sanctioned album re-press since 1972 and so, without further ado, please enjoy my insightful and delightful 12-question conversation with Heart Working Class founder and integral piece of the Paternoster puzzle, the one and only Stephan Szillus. Stephan Szillus, a German journalist with a Hip-Hop background but with a worldly score, heeded the call and found Franz Wippel," Now-Again Records founder Egon wrote within his extensive 65-page Paternoster re-issue liner notes referencing a fateful 2014 Instagram post that started a cross-continental journey to track down the long-lost makers of a fabled album that's been compared to everyone from Pink Floyd to Procol Harum. That kickstarted this re-issue, as I put out a call to find someone–anyone–who could put me in touch with any of Paternoster's principal members. He had kept two copies of the album–one with a proto-type, hand-colored cover–and he traded the other to me. "The venerable Austrian rock-scribe Johan "Hans" Pokora was the most welcoming–he, through his Record Collectors' Dreams books, had first canonized Paternoster, bestowing upon the album his highest honor of six-stars (the rarest of rare records) and also placing next to it his "symbol-of-music". ![]()
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