Krautrock innovator Gunter Hess had been trying to cut down on whores.
But as he spent most of his days composing, and the rest meditating, he
just didn't have time for a relationship. Relationships tended to haul
his Solar Sailer down from the stratosphere to drag its struts in the
mud. The sex, yes, bangzoom to the universe -- but then a sharp look, a
cutting argument, a domestic detail, and suddenly right back down on
the street with the homeless and the traffic and the garbage in the
gutters...it just wasn't worth it.

Relationships were the anchors to his zeppelin.

Gunter Hess had done the rockstar touring thing back in the seventies
with his band Märchenwelt. Everybody came, a sea of long-haired stoned
faces. In '82 the band broke up, but nobody noticed. They'd long since
missed the cutoff. But so what -- Gunter had all the money he could
ever need, and then some. He vigorously, jealousy, guarded it from
fraudulent accountants by managing it all himself. An anomaly in
Hollywood, but nevertheless. Gunter had been a mathematician before
going into synthesizers, before going into rock and roll...he knew how
to goddamn count, for chrissake, and besides, it was the 80s -- he kept
it all on his Mac.

The funny thing about the keyboard music out of this era is that you
recognize the sounds from one keyboard or another. There's a Korg M1
right there. These percussion sounds are from a Roland D5. It always
amazed Gunter when someone just held down a key, laying down a pure
keyboard patch as if they were responsible for creating it. The first
one to do that on an album claimed ownership of the pad -- who cares if
Keith Emerson had designed it and it was freely available at Guitar
Center for anybody with the $59.95 to buy the memory card -- the first
person to make it popular, expose it to the ears of the masses, owned
it. Until now Gunter had resisted the temptation to, upon buying a new
keyboard or soundcard, make an album full of keyboard washes using
every single patch on the goddamn thing, so as just to urinate his
ownership all over it -- that'd never fly. Firstly, the record company
wouldn't release it and he'd have to dig in his accounts and use his
own money, and the first rule of the putting out a record was NEVER USE
YOUR OWN MONEY. Secondly, it'd piss off all his other keyboard friends,
all the other synth gods in the city and all over the world. The
general public might not know what was going on, but they would, the
synth gods/'esses, and it'd be tense in the analog/digital set for
sure. This club, of keyboardists with long hair and long suits walking
on the crumbling white beaches of the world...was a very exclusive
club, and once you got in you did not go behaving foolishly. Thirdly,
he wasn't a cocksucker. He considered himself a cut above the usual
hollywood fuckfaces creeping from pub to pub down on the darkness of
the 2 a.m. streets, scoring heroin -- from his perch in the hills he
could spin his telescope and more often then not land on someone scoring
heroin -- anyway, he wasn't one of those desperate seedy hollywood
jagoffs.

Philistines, thought Gunter Hess.