Hanschenklein Berlin

achtung manifesto !



  Hänschenklein


Hänschenklein is a collaboration between director Alex Herzog and musician Bernd Norbert Wuertz and an attempt to create music and a visualisation of it.
The name of our "band" comes from a famous German nursery rhyme in which the main character little Hänschenkleinsets out to discover the world. He quickly realises that the world out there is evil.
However we are good! Or at least we hope so.


The whole project started about 5 years ago more or less as an experiment. The idea was to produce a music video based on an audiovisual concept that applied to both sound and picture, rather than scoring a finished film with a soundtrack or making a video for an already existing music piece.



So far we've made 5 videos, which have been running on numerous film / art & media festivals, e.g.: the Impakt Media Art Festival in Holland in 2005, the New York Underground Film Festival in 2004 and the Independent Music Video Festival where Luftgitarre was voted number 1 favourite by the Seattle screening audience in 2004. Luftgitarre and Don Quatro were also on rotation on 2 German music channels: Viva and Onyx. Don Quatro was also shown on Dutch TV as one of the Impakt favourites in 2005. Yinwanggitarre got a Jury mention at last year's Independent Exposure.

Encouraged by these numerous positive responses we decided to carry on, make more videos and release the whole work as a DVD album, including a CD with extra music tracks.




Bio Alex Herzog


Alexander was born in Dettingen Germany in 1968. After a fairly happy childhood he started programming computer games (on a VC20), repairing old VWs, hanging around at car junk yards, welding sculptures that were too big to throw away, making music in the still (and luckily) unknown band Amboss with two guitars and a Casio sk5 keyboard. In 1991 he started to study graphic design in Aachen but quit pretty soon after realising that drawing in the middle of a bunch of well behaved geeks was not exactly his thing.

Soon after he went to Berlin with the idea to work with sound and moving images. He survived art school with a slightly damaged brain where a wind of something rotten is blowing through the corridors.

After a strange odyssey of making techno music videos, sausages, tv design, bricklaying and flame operating, he ended up as a director for music promos and commercials.

But how to get out there unharmed? Hänschenklein? Or is the end in the mental hospital approaching?





Bio Bernd Norbert Würtz

Born into a family of musicians in 1974 in Rockenhausen (Germany) "Norb" started taking piano lessons at an early age but his old-fashioned, authoritarian piano teacher did a good job in ensuring he would never pursue the classical path. He re-discovered music in his early teens through punkrock and started to experiment with sound with tape loops and the bizarre collection of his dad’s instruments.

Another important turning point was when he was offered a sampler that he used in making an album from his grandmother’s body noises. He later discovered that this sort of thing had already been done in Musique Concrète, which led him onto artists such as Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, etc....
After finishing highschool, he studied art history and philosophy in Mainz, Germany. Whether these studies will ever be helpful for his musical career is yet to be proven.
In 1995 he moved to London to join the band "Yummy", as a bassist. During a 3-year-stay playing numerous gigs, he got increasingly obsessed with electronic music especially sampling, which gradually became more important than playing the bass in a band.
Being constantly broke and sick of yuppie landlords in London, he moved to Berlin in 1998. While composing music for experimental film, tv promos etc. he met director Alex Herzog. Born out of the idea to do something worthwhile for a change, they founded the Hänschenklein project, for which they produce their own music and videos independently with “out of date softwares”, old cables, very low budgets… and even write their own biographies in english.


We avoid using common patterns…