9. Farewell To Overhead (Which Was A Popular School Broadcasting Technique Back In The Old Days)
Lyrics: Frank Apunkt Schneider
Music: Richard Wientzek, Michael Reinhold, Klas Yngborn
Michael Reinhold, Klas Yngborn: voc, all instruments
Arr., Mix & Prod.: Michael Reinhold (www.music-works.de) & Klas Yngborn at Soundtank Studios (www.sound-tank.de) Berlin 2007


There is a time in life when the world had not yet fallen apart. Remember?! You sit in the classroom still not completely frustrated looking at the world outside and what do you see? Things that might be great to know about such as photosynthesis, USA, Canada, penises or vaginas. You feel the desire for touching all of these with your reasonable apparatus and to sniff through it like an old pervert would sniff through girls’ used panties. This is shortly before you realize that it is just ideology they sell as “knowledge”. You don’t know about "Bose-Einstein condensate" being the working class of the physical world at that point.
It is the faith in arranging things in comprehensive structures that you lose when you grow older. Soon you’ll have to accept that your brain is just another machine in the capitalist machine pool. There’s no chance to change this unless you want to drop out completely on LSD or religion. But next to hopelessness desire grows. Desire to express what you have lost by the means of a coming-of-age-movie or some piece of weird but beautiful lo-fi independent pop ditty. Just close your eyes and remember the smell of a classroom in the morning. Everything in perfect harmony. But what is this humming – steady and sedative, categorical and provident? Oh shit, yeah – it’s the overhead projector!!! That big and gracious thing, not quite a beau but of noble grandeur. Humming its sweet promise: you can understand everything as long as you can put it on a transparent plastic sheet. The teacher must have switched it on. He wants to show some schematic hand drawings of some social or biological phenomenon again. Overhead is a warm gun. It’s totally unlike powerpoint – this DJ Ötzi of information, this crystal meth of communication. Overhead was more of a Vic Chestnutt album. His apparatusness did shine through the classroom. And it tried to give you a dialectic-materialistic idea about its technicity through design. Now it is dead media. Rest well on wikipedia…
When we got that call for entries from a dead media congress focussing on the overhead projector in Copenhagen in September 2005 (www.overheads.org) we knew that only some glamorous old school melancholia could cope with what we had lost. We performed “Farewell to overhead” for the first time at that congress together with our good old friend Oliver Hangl. This is the new version. Its generic heart-warming independent waltz twist tells us: no chance to bring overhead back. We know because we’ve tried. We thought about reviving overhead by trying to prove its pornographic possibilities. You know: porn – the eternal sovereign determining media destinies. So we ran some trials (the meagre results are shown here: www.monochrom.at/ocs). But porn is such a powerpointish thing, we failed.


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