A Khan side-project fronted by a fictional bassist: one 1989 LP of mutant space-rock built from distorted samples and damaged beats, a constructed character in place of a band.
Brigitte & The Hansen Experience is one of the fictional projects Achim P. Li Khan ran in his off hours from HNAS, and the Bureau files it at Tier III alongside Damenbart as a gesture of the same Aachen cluster. Its single LP, Frau Hansen Am Bass, appeared on Dom Elchklang in 1989 in an edition of 200, recorded at the Bartlos and Notkunststudio rooms in Aachen.
The conceit is in the title. The group is presented as the vehicle of a bass virtuoso named Brigitte Hansen, a persona built out across the sleeve and the track titles rather than a real performer. Where Damenbart forged a whole lost band, this record invents a single fictional star and stages her, deadpan, as the centre of the music. The titles keep the joke running, from Meine Abende Im Hauptquartier to Bass Illusionen (Hansen Over Europe), the imaginary Hansen on an imaginary world tour.
The sound itself is no joke. The two side-long tracks are mutant space-rock assembled from distorted samples, stretches of atmospheric interference and beats so damaged and out of sync that the few listeners who found the record came away disoriented. It is tape music in the HNAS manner, produced and mixed by Khan in the sampler-and-collage direction he took out of the parent group, set against the drone-and-tape direction of his co-founder Christoph Heemann.
The tiny pressing sold through, the fictional bassist gained a small cult, and the record became an elusive collectible before a later CD on Psychedelic Pig brought it back. The Bureau files Brigitte & The Hansen Experience as a documented case of the fictional-persona gesture that recurs across the Dom Elchklang catalogue, where the invented character is as much the work as the sound.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Renaissance · last revised c. the Anthropocene