Just in case you're wondering, Andrez Bergen is an expat Australian music, movie and anime journalist, photographer, hack DJ, record label head-honcho (IF?), writer, and experimental electronic music producer who's been based in Tokyo over the past eight years.
He's also bunked up in London, traveled a bit round the globe, and during the course of a decade and a half of hack journalism has interviewed people as far afield as Kraftwerk, Jeff Mills, Coldcut, Genesis P. Orridge (from industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle), Derrick May, Si Begg, Hifana, Famke Janssen (from the "X-Men" movies), Front Line Assembly, Laibach, Orbital, Cabaret Voltaire, and anime directors Mamoru Oshii and Satoshi Kon.
His crap scribblings have appeared in newspapers like THE AGE in Australia and the YOMIURI SHIMBUN in Japan, along with magazines like ANIME INSIDER and GEEK MONTHLY in the USA, IMPACT mag in Hong Kong and the UK, plus British mags MIXMAG, REMIX and WAX, VICE mag in Australia, Beatportal, Juice, Oyster, Catalog, 3D World, Rave, Australian Style, Onion, X-Press, Beat & Zebra, blah, blah, blah. These days he's also a regular hack for the way cool online FUN IN THE MURKY site.
Over the past 15 years Andrez has also worked as a DJ (once dubbed the Jean-Luc Godard of mixing - think discordant jump-cuts!), a wayward record label impresario, and trigger-happy muzak producer. He helmed his own radio show, 'CYBERDADA', on Melbourne station 3PBS-FM for seven years from 1994 to 2001.
In 2005, Andrez married New York based artist Yoko Umehara, who had just moved back to Tokyo, and in November that year the couple had the world's cutest daughter, called Cocoa - and who now (at age 3) does occasional vocals on his muzak and tries to distract him with cute monologues about pirates and the Cookie Monster.
In 2010, stay tuned (if you can indeed be bothered) for his first novel, called Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, being published by Another Sky Press in Portland, Oregon in the U.S., as well as an off-beat Tokyo travelogue called Tokyo Zu-Zushii
LITTLE NOBODY rant:
Andrez kick-started his Little Nobody sound-system project in 1996 first as a one-minute silence joke, then for real with his debut track "Nobody's Driving" on the critically-acclaimed Australian compilation 'Zeitgeist 3' (1997), alongside people like Voiteck, Honeysmack, TR-Storm, Jammin' Unit, Blimp, Cinnaman, Adam Raisbeck (Sense), Zen Paradox and Artificial.
The LN project's perimeters were a far-reaching hotch-potch of styles, from dub and jazz to cut-up sampling, old skool hip hop references, disco-chic, and electro-clash ramifications. I think you get the gist, hey? Think anything goes, blend it up, whip it good, abd add a measure or two of hilarity.
Constantly morphing along the way, Little Nobody has since produced several albums and EPs for innovative Australian record label IF? Records, Dead Channel in the U.K., Elektrax in Sydney, TTAK in Japan, and Auricular in the U.S., and the remix single release ('Bare') was adjudged Single Of The Week in Melbourne's BEAT magazine waaay back in 2001.
Little Nobody also featured on Si Begg's rambunctious NOODLES DISCOTHEQUE and in 2001 his second Little Nobody album, 'Action Hero', was one of the 4 final nominees for Best Album Of The Year in the 2001 Australian Dance Music Awards (the Avalanches were the eventual winner, o' course).
Seven years later, in 2008, Andrez broke the barometer with a rash of 14 EPs and two albums, and looks likely to do better than this in '09. Not all of it proficient, mind you.
The little blighter's muzak and output has also blessedly been remixed by a slew of international producers I happen to love: from Noodles man SI BEGG in London to New York's STEVE STOLL, Steve Cobb from FILA BRAZILLIA to Jason Leach from SUBHEAD, by Japanese producers CAPTAIN FUNK, SHIN NISHIMURA, DJ WARP, GADGET CASSETTE and TOSHIYUKI YASUDA; Amsterdam's VOCO DERMAN has also had a go, along with Scottish geezers TOBIAS SCHMIDT and DAVE TARRIDA, and on into Berlin's JAMMIN' UNIT and BRIXTON, fellow German producers MIJK VAN DIJK and BIOCHIP C, Parisian enfant terrible TAL (Sub-Rosa), LUKE'S ANGER, DONK BOYS, PATRICK PULSINGER, WYNDELL LONG, BILL YOUNGMAN and PAUL BIRKEN have also had a go.
Over the years, Bergen has toured Japan, played in London, tweaked knobs in Detroit, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, twiddled live-ish in Windsor in Canada, in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and in a humble scout hall in the middle of nowhere just outside Groningen in the Netherlands - not to mention extensively around Australia.
Ad infinitum, blah, blah. zzzz.
Oh yeah, there's more to send you to sleep: Over the past 15 years he's played at legendary Melbourne clubs like FILTER, TERIYAKI ANARKI SAKI, CENTRIPHUGAL, MORE BASS, GLOBAL WARMING, REVOLVER, and HONKYTONKS, along with that city's big warehouse parties such as Hardware, Every Picture Tells A Story, Earthcore, War Of The Worlds, Omniglobe, Sunshine People, Where The wild Things Are, and Belfast. In Sydney he's popped up at Frigid, Freaky Loops, Club Kooky, Phreakin', Warm Up, & Scissors*Paper*Rock - while in Tokyo he's played at Womb, Nuts, Concrete, TTAK gigs and Bullets.
Look out for other of Andrez's crap sounds as FUNK GADGET, SCHLOCK TACTILE, DICK DRONE, SLAM-DUNK NINJA, CURVACEOUS CRUSTACEAN, LNEE MINUS 3, CONVERSATIONAL DENTURES, DJ FODDER, LITTLE BITCHES, etc.
