Olaf Bender - LAb[au]

Olaf Bender

Olaf Benders experimental work with film-material started during school-time. The casual finding of a complete 16mm movie equipment gave the initiation. From this time on started an intensive dealing with the medium 'film' as well as the raw material 'film'. Technical limitations forced special methods: He scratched directly on the footage with objects to create geometrical figures. The results were archaic motion patterns. Due to the experiments he came into contact with the East-German underground band AG-Geige.

In 1988 he became a permanent member of AG-Geige. By working with this group he got into musical aspects. Home computer made it possible for autodidacts like him to work multimedial without knowledge of practical musical skills.

After the fall down of Berlin Wall in 1989 he was working with a music distributor. The work experiences he collected there led to the idea of publishing own musical projects by himself. He and together with Frank Bretschneider founded the record label rastermusic in 1996. Rastermusic wanted to publish their own electronic music projects and those of other similar working artists.

The special process of creating electronic sound should be reflected also in the graphical presentation of the label and his products.One of the earliest rastermusic productions was the project signal, which Olaf Bender has been continuing together with Bretschneider and Nicolai until today.

________SEPARATOR________

Nicolai owned the sublabel noton, which finally merged with rastermusic to raster-noton in 1999. Beside the management of raster-noton he is responsibly the graphic design and public appearance. Additionally Bender performs solo under the pseudonym byetone.

1968 born in Karl-Marx-Stadt / GDR
1974 - 87 secondary school and apprenticeship as tailor
1990 - 93 work as graphic designer with different agencies
1993 - 95 agent in media distribution
1996 founded rastermusic, works independently in Chemnitz
rastermusic and noton, merged in raster-noton