F.S. Blumm
A biography
34 years ago, F.S. Blumm was born as Frank Schültge in the city of Bremen,
Northern Germany. As a child, one of his older brother’s AC/DC records impressed
him so much, he begged his parents for his own guitar immediately. But he only got a
recorder. After another long year of waiting and more begging, he finally got his guitar
including training. In spite of (or maybe even because of) his classical training, Frank
developed a taste for noise during those years. In his youthful endeavour for being
different, he played in quite a few bands, highly influeneced by acts like Sonic Youth,
Melvins, Boredoms and later even Gastr Del Sol. In an interview with German music
mag Jazzthetik, F.S. Blumm described the results like this: „We played Bach like
hardcore fugues. Fast, parallel, crooked, distorted and loud.“
In 1990 he began to study music and arts in order to become a teacher. After his
exams in 1996, he moved to Berlin in 1997, where he focuesed on freelancing as a
musician and composer. Schültge fast became active in many different contexts. The
multi instrumentalist Harald „Sack“ Ziegler from Cologne and him formed the duo
Sack & Blumm. Together with Berlin based Marcel Türkowsky, he also started an
instrumental band called Kinn and he finally went public as solo artist F.S. Blumm.
At the same time he started to write and produce radio plays for public radio (i.e.
SWR, WDR and DLR) with his partner Christian Berner. Both have won awards,
sponsorships and scholarships for their work.
Until the end of the 90s, Blumms musical interest for anything Rock slowly faded
away. Instead, he became more and more active on a lot of different musical fields
that cannot be summed up easily. There are a few aspects that apply to all of
Blumm’s work, though. The major aspect holding together his body of work is in his
own words clarity, meaning F.S. Blumm always tries to find the essence of a
particular musical idea. Additionally, F.S. Blumm is quite an „acoustic“ person. He’d
rather beat on anything that swings and resonates, than to spend hours in front of
computers and sequencers, which he considers as a waste of time. Not only
because, he does not know how to use them properly, but also because this way of
working is too exhausting for him. Although most of his music is completely
handmade, F.S. Blumm often is paradoxically received as an electronica act, which in
the first place is due to the fact that he releases on labels like Morr Music, Tomlab,
Audiodregs and many more. These connections make sense, anyway, because after
all, those labels think of themselves as platforms for new music.