Tuxedomoon Bassist Peter Principle, 63, Passes From Heart Attack

Peter Principle

PETER PRINCIPLE, one of the key members of AMERICAN avant-garde rock band TUXEDOMOON, unexpectedly passed away in BRUSSELS last week (JULY 17th), at 63, from a heart attack.. 

TUXEDOMOON celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and had gathered in BRUSSELS to rehearse for a tour and to write music for a new album.  The band formed in SAN FRANCISCO in the late-'70s with the punk and avant-garde scenes as a backdrop, along with fellow groups like THE RESIDENTS, whose RALPH RECORDS released their debut album, "Half-Mute," in 1980. The band relocated to NEW YORK, then to BRUSSELS, where they gained a loyal following.

PETER was an exceptional bass and guitar player, and a sonic experimentalist. He had joined TUXEDOMOON shortly after the band's creation by STEVEN BROWN and BLAINE REININGER and played a central role in the composition, recording and production of all the band's records, from their first EPs and their debut album "Half-Mute" (1980) to their most recent releases, the "Pink Narcissus" album (2014) and the original soundtrack for the film "Blue Velvet Revisited" (2015).

PRINCIPLE also recorded four solo albums ("Sedimental Journey" and  "Tone Poem",  respectively released by CRA,,ED in 1985 and 1989, as part of the MADE TO MEASURE series, and "Conjunction" (1990) and "Idyllatry" (2005), in which he gave free rein to his taste for experimentation and his love for quasi-psychedelic soundscapes. He once explained that he  had discovered the magic of pure sound by listening to the sound of lawn-mowers in his native NEW YORK suburb, and then proceeded to reinvent musique concrète (which he didn’t know already existed)… 

Born PETER DACHART, he had adopted this pseudonym as an ironic tribute to the book of the same name ("The Peter Principle", a satirical management theory which states a.o. that, in all hierarchies, any employee tends to rise to the position where he reaches a maximal level of  incompetence, or something like that…)

PRINCIPLE also produced albums for other artists, including MINIMAL COMPACT, MARINE, ISOLATION WARD and SPRUNG AUS DEN WOLKEN, and recorded with the likes of WIM MERTENS. These last few years, he collaborated with his friend DOK GREGORY under the project name ZERO GRAVITY THINKERS..

« see more Net News