Accidentally, I came across a musician lately. It is a story about how social media should work.

In April, @cellonaut from Twitter followed me. Just as always when someone follows, I inspected his tweets and bio… hm, cello player. Quite obvious from his Twitter alias. Hash tags told me he was about to play my home town in May. Then I got to his site: The sound examples simply blew me away (see “Press” and “CDs”). I had to go see him play. I had to CONTACT him. Xing and Facebook got us fully connected. We arranged for an interview. Btw, he’s great at tweeting too… on his way from Hamburg to Trier (where he was about to play) he was kind of twinterviewed – @hunderttausend, Trier online mag, played Q&A for 6 (!) hours.

A musician, playing an instrument as traditional as a cello in a most non-traditional way. Open to online life. That’s great. This has to be fun.

Now, you may ask yourself – who is this guy?
Wolfram Huschke plays Cello. Actually, this is much the same as if I’d introduce Tony Levin as playing bass. Or Steve Vai [link broken, 2016-03-10] as playing guitar.

Starting out at the age of 5, Huschke played Cello ever since. He studied Cello at Weimar, Saarbrücken and Salzburg. Even before German Democratic Republic opened, he became a session cello player in East Berlin.

In the 90s, he discovered and embraced E-Cello and released several albums crossing boundaries, not by ignoring tradition but integrating it and by presenting his audience with “world music” at its best. Melting classical as well as popular music to form sound architectures. One instrument, incorporating every inch of sound you might think of.

He toured USA, South Africa and Europe and eventually charted in Belgium and Greece. Huschke supported Westernhagen, one of Germany’s most acknowledged and successful rock acts during tour playing stadiums like Munich Olympic Stadium. Also, he collaborated with Peter Hamill and Marianne Faithfull on the Huschke solo album “Alien Diary” which was produced by Hector Zazou.

Well, I guess you got it. He is a cello player extraordinair. Any style from any instrument played by cello.

Did I mention the concert was a true experience? If this guy plays your town (well, or any other city near you) – do not miss him, seriously. And, forget about Apocalyptica.

We had our interview on May 15. I’m thankful for the opportunity to talk to Wolfram. Right now, we are doing some editing and I’m working at transcription and translation – hell, one hour (which made it in the cut) is a whole lot to do… Starting in the next few days, you will get five video episodes. Unfortunately, these are available in German only. But, being a truely good guy, I’m doing the English translation…

This text has been published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported licence. If you would like to make use of the text or parts of it in a way that goes beyond the scope please get in touch with me.