Sach' ma nix

"Well, just between us: me, I'd rather look like everybody else, you know, all them that came before me, all the ancestors I've had, who… whether decent middle-class folks or scruffy good-for-nothings, the way the whole lot of them looked, that's how I wanna look – but sometimes maybe I'd like to look like my mom too, and then like my dad again the next day, though I realised recently that I also resemble my grandson a good bit too, well, nope, yeah, well na, no, yes, na, I mean: not when it comes to the face, not the face – but his posture, the way he walks and moves… he's just eleven but I often say "I got that from my grandson", that's what I often say.

Na, 'cause we're always looking for something on the Lower Rhine, how it all fits together, we wanna figure out how the whole thing fits together, you know?

My dad was related to everybody now, you see…"

Anyone who observes so finely and sees that everything must be connected, anyone who could make such fine feel, timing and underestimated musicality visible and perceptible in uranine, must also be subliminally connected with people from other times and lives. Captain Niederrhein – W-HUESCH! – W-HUESCH! W-HUESCH! - is arguably the secret mega-superhero of the 2024 Whitsuntide Pageant in Moers, even though his ninety-ninth is only being celebrated in a thoroughly avant-garde manner here… "It's transience of course that also plays a part. It's always the same things that I have in my head. Everything down, everything done, everything over, but I have them in my body, in my head, in my eyes, in my heart, kidneys, legs and feet, and my hands talk about it constantly… my hands are from Moers." Peter Engelhardt, also from Moers, free-associates on his guitar – W-UESCH! – at least as passionately as the Captain does with his pen. Just like Achim Krämer, who has drummed his brains out throughout the Ruhrgebiet, Moers and – W-HUESCH! – all across self-drawn partial maps of the world. "It was always a matter of life and death." Oxana Omelchuk lives and composes these days in Cologne, but the Captain already recognized her superpower when she was still tinkering with old Soyuz synthesizers in Bjarosa, Belarus – W-HUESCH! "Did too! He told me himself." And regarding Nonoko Yoshida's alto playing, which he already anticipated decades ago while viewing Japanese films without soundtracks – SHHH! – he said: "It's the nerves – impeccable!" For the fact that contrabassist Silvia Bolognesi is the second Italian woman coming to his beloved hamlet on the Lower Rhine in twennytwennyfour he offered up an elegant explanation: "It's the weather." So, maybe we'd best just hold our tongues and listen some more instead:

"And then I headed off into the uncertain: sixtytwo, sixtythree, sixtyfour… and the land was flat thank god and the black-and-white cows kept an eye on me and the calves followed me and the windmills let their sails hang low and the church spires all took a bow.

And then you could only see the radio dial and that magical green eye and then sometimes a cigarette glimmer… the famous Lower Rhine numbers game. Well, you know, I'll be, in 2025 I'll be a hundred… na, I mean until then… yeah, there still a lot of time till then, na, but then I would turn a hundred too. Na, I mean it doesn't have to happen. Doesn't have to, not necessarily. Nope, nope, nope – It really doesn't have to happen."