Maureen Hallomas


Maureens Top Ten

1. Offspring
My number one is my son. He has my sense of humour so we have some mega good times and mega laughs. My heart swells when I hear him singing to himself and watch him dance like no one is watching. He has a fascination with gloves and Ultraman.

2. Halloween
As long as I can remember I have been drawn to Halloween decorations and all images associated with it. My mother says it is because she went to a Haunted House when she was pregnant with me. I collect Halloween themed stuff. I have 15-20 pairs of Halloween socks, I wear them all year long, everyday.

3. Spontaneous dancing/dancing
Impromptu dance parties in parking lots with the car stereo, friends in the front room making a dance circle, in the kitchen with my son, after a killer gig, I love to dance! Dancing makes me feel alive!

4. Driving with good tunes
As a teenager I loved driving late at night to a friends on route 24 in Mass listening to VU on cassette. One of those life changing things.. A good one recently was driving through rural N.H. at night, listening to D. Lynch's Crazy Clown Time. I don't drive much anymore but when I get the chance, what I listen to is most important.

5. Campfires
I love the light, the heat, the smell. Poking fire with a stick. Great big burning bonfires. Getting all primitive and back to basics sitting under the stars . Fire fire fire!

6. Baking
Creative baking! I always bake vegan and enjoy making sweet tasty treats that everyone can eat. I love a challenge of an allergy or dietary restriction . Some favourite creations are cut up cakes where I made witches, a clown and a creepy doll. Also using ingredients like marmite, black sesame seeds, and lavender. Baking and dancing go together well.

7. Lighting
Lighting can change the vibe in an instant. I do not like over head lights. I love soft lighting, stringed lights, lava lamps, liquid light shows, and rain lamps. Nature can provide the best light of all, like smoke from forest fires or dust clouds that cover the sun or a September sunset over Brighton beach.

8. Baths
Baths are great to relax, help a hangover, ground you, and to pamper yourself as well as to just wash. The baths in Budapest are amazing. I hope to experience more amazing bath places like a natural hot springs and outdoor hot tubs. I would love a bath in one of those places with the deep wooden tubs in Japan but I have tattoos and wonder if I would be allowed.

9. Geeking out
It's wonderful to feel uninhibited and to be able to let my freak flag fly. It may be when I can talk for ages about Star Trek or Buffy or it may be discussing conspiracy theories while wearing a handmade Halloween sweater. Mostly the best is just communicating in moans, squelches, squeaks, and grunts with my buddies.

10. Ninjas
Two years of studying a traditional Japanese martial art has been the medicine I need to stay sane and healthy. It is wonderful to learn something new and to challenge both body and mind. When I started and would watched others I thought I would never be able to do what they do. Now I am doing those things and enjoying it. So much more to learn!

Maureen Hallomas was one time member of the Polly Shang Kuan Band, Leopard Leg, Sonny Tufts, Agatha & The Christies to name but a few. She occasionally plays out solo as Teignmouth Electron and can currently be found grappling the bass with post punk lunks Structure. She creates orgasmic cake yumness under the name Wicked Goody Goo Cakes and won't put up with any shit.


Brandstifter


10 Points About The Arsonist's Cosmic Fire Department

1. Casio SK1
Besides my girlfriend Tanja "Allerliebst" Roolfs, as my absolutely number one person, my number one as a mix between toy – I use a lot of toys onstage - and instrument is the Casio SK1. I once bought mine for 5 Deutsche Mark on a fleamarket in the 90's (instead of passing a test as a study in law). It features small keys for little not-piano-player-hands and is easy to carry around to have big fun with the sample function... I once made it be played by a walking massage tool and since then some keys are a bit loose or with my funky ass at Good Bye Blue Monday in Bushwick for Experi-MENTAL Festival and it still works! In New York my friend Michael Durek convinced me to join him to form a SK Orchestra. We first battled live at the GBBM as SK DUO and ended up playing gigs with up to 30 people, a mix of trained musicians, dilettants, circuit bended Sks live on stage, all improvising with this small keyboard from Japan in a theatre at Times Square and drunken in the subway after that.

2. N.O.T.H.I.N.G.
When I do something my second thought is: better do NOTHING! But that I want to do nothing does obviously not mean that I have nothing to do.... I love collabs and hate the myth of the genious artist sitting alone im Elfenbeinturm eating his heart out to produce great works. This is why I started my artzine series ANTIPODES with a lot of exchange, correspondance and the romantic idea of two artist standing foot to foot on the other side of the earth but working together on one (0physical) collage. I already put out 15 editions with collages, copy art, asemic writing or concrete poetry and when I present them at book fairs it's not only me sitting there alone cause I always have my dear collegues like John M. Bennett, Texas Fontanella or Hundefaenger with me lying there on the table...

3. Musketeers?
If I count to three and don't have an idea I will leave it blank... Hold on! Three is one too much: I always had one best friend, one favorite guitar, one girl friend.... guess I am too lazy for poligamy. Wizards of Oi are only Aaron Moore and me and if you think about the Three Musketeers there's additionally one outstanding D'Artagnan who made them famous, so they were actually four of them! When I was a schoolboy they sold Drei Musketiere chocolate bars which were three woven very sweet, sticky but chewy caramel blades and I remember a collegue from grammar school asking his father at the public pool to give him money for that and that the father replied he should better buy One Musketeer with his own pocket money...

4. Against problems
Wot are we fighting 4? free drinks, food and living, speech, payment (which might save a lot of our problems). I am very pro free citizens income...

5. Records
Five spontenaeous record suggestions: 1. Can - Ege Bamyasi (of course you nerds all know them! - maybe as it's the first of their albums I bought.... I remember listening to it for the first time in my car taped on Cassette while driving through Dolomites' serpentines in northern Italy. Btw: Please don't forget to play Sing Swan Song at my funeral! I love the sound of the water at the start, my favourite Geraeusch...), 2. Klaus Beyer ‎- Die Fanklubplatte (Klaus Beyer is an ingenious Beatles interpreter and art brut (super8) film maker. I was member number 1276 in his Fanclub in the 90's and Klaus peformed three Lennon songs on my legendary birthday party 180118 at Watt Berlin. His manager our friend Frank Behnke is an author, filmmaker, actor (he played a small role at David Lynch's Blue Velvet), musician and founding member of the Berlin noise band Mutter. I „stole their song Ein kleines Stueck Papier as the perfect anthem for my lost & found project Asphaltbibliotheque. I always announce the piece as a performance by Brandstifter but force my audience instead to sing it in canon two in one accompained by me playing Melodica 3. Hurray - Treasure Chest (found this and another one of their great albums at my favorite NY bookshop Printed Matter – they sell my shit, too! - also a CD by Benjamin Patterson one of the founders of FLUXUS, who died in 2016. We were both doing his/our last performance on stage in Wiebaden as a duo togehther at a performance festival, which I recorded and it was published on vinyl short before his death and postmortal released in a light box object by V.E.B. Freie Brandstiftung & his great daughter Barbro.), 4. S.Y.P.H. – S.Y.P.H. (aka The Black Album, maybe the first German (art) punk band with experimental approach working/recording with Hoger Czukay, they draw my attention to Can and made me find out that Kraut is not Hippy at all. Their singer my friend Harry Rag/Peter Braatz is living as a filmmaker in Laibach, 5. T.U.O.B. - Dont fight at gigs (I only own this 7inch and a rare tape from Germany which is not on Discogs... so if someone has more stuff by T.UO.B. please let me know!)

6. Sex and Dada
Six is my lucky number. In German six is sechs, which sometimes sounds like sex when it's bad prounced, which I like, too (but only when it's good). The sixth release on my artist music label FLUX ON DEMAND is When Hulbeck's Cigar Gently Weeps with fieldrecordings and feedbacks from the birthhouse of the German DADAist Richard Huelsenbeck. It comes with a booklet with photographs from the former pharmacy in Frankenau which is a museum for Dada and refugees now. Not lucky: I put a box with the releases in a "safe spot“ in our crowded appartment and now I can't find it anymore! I have to send some copies to Guillaume who is selling my artzines and tapes at Staalplaat Berlin...

7. Joys of Mary
I once covered The Seven Joys or Mary I found in the Burl Ives Songbook with my 90's project Bussibaeren Massaker. Using my Casio MT 45 (I also have the Casio Tonebank, SA-21) as the rhythm section and playing a Velvet Underground guitar it sounded a bit like the famous 39 Clocks from Hannover. Hannover was also the home of the legendary mass murder Fritz Harmann and the famous underground club Silke Arp bricht, where I played a lot and met people like Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, shouting with me on adrenalin when I was jumping into the audience, Ansgar Wilken or my close friend Hans Joachim Knust a.k.a. Dr. Proll, a genious non trained natural artist with a big heart, obsessed by German discounter ALDI. Hannover was also once the hometown of the great Merz artist Kurt Schwitters, friend of Hannah Hoech, another great Berlin Dada collagist and if you get snail mail by Brandstifter you might find a Hannah Hoch Fanclub stamp designed by Reed Altemus on it...

8. Asphaltbibliotheque
1998 I declared every street and public space as Aphaltbibliotheque (Tarmac Library) and since that I am visiting the whole world through artist residencies and stipends collecting lost & found sheets of paper for my conceptual art project with huge wall collage installations, artzines, books, videos and fieldrecordings. I love paper which is made of wood but easier to carry or write on. You can also make artists' book out of them which I prefer to paintings as you can put them in your shelf and don't have to look at them the whole time....

9. Inch Fails
When I played a gig at Goldene Krone Darmstadt as Brandstifter Live From The Ironing Board, distorting my vox and Casio through a stereo sound mixing machine for kids and going crazy on stage with feedback I made a new fan who compared my noisemusic and performance to Nine Inch Nails/Trent Raznor. Before the gig I was wondering about guys putting eyeliners on in the bathroom. There was a grufti/dark wave disco going on in the same bulding. Guess this was the day when I stopped dying my hair in black....

10. € artist
I trend to sell my zines, tapes, CDs for at least 10 euros. It's not that much and you don't have to carry change around. I also trade or gift (did you know that gift means poison in german? Jowe Head from my alltime faves Swell Maps and The Palookas used the term on one of his solo albums...) them sometimes to nice or good looking collegues. Some musicians think that's too expensive, but the artists say I am selling too cheap.... so this is why I prefer to make easy but limited artist editions, which are not too expensive for listeners and please my neat art collectors, too. I am really happy to be a fulltime artist and as I do visual art, music, performance and I am running the non profit art organisation Walpodenakademie with Tanja and a small crowd to offer a platformat for crazy artists and musicians like YOU, I don't have time for any other rubbish to waste my time! So don't be geizig or better order at Dylan's Cuckoo’s Nest Chocolate Monk, guys!

Born 1968 in Bad Kreuznach, Rhineland-Palatine, Germany. The Head of Mainzer Kunstverein Walpodenstraße 21 is an interdisciplinary Artist and Networker, tranforming his Visual- and Performance Art, Sound and Music as well as Lyrics by means of Social interaction to Intermedia.

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