Missing Foundation history: En Esch remembers

An early incarnation of Missing Foundation in Hamburg Germany included members that went on to achieve notoriety in the band KMFDM. Below we have another installment of MF recollections compiled by Vincent Dominion. This time En Esch remembers some of the early days...


[Pete Missing- far right- in Hamburg circa 1984 with members of Neubauten and KMFDM]


I was a member of Missing Foundation in late 1984 in Hamburg, Germany. We did one gig and recording in a studio there. I am not sure what happened to the tapes. It was my first musical encounter with my ex-band mate Sascha K. He was playing bass and I was the drummer back then. I saw Peter on a few occasions back then; he used to live there for a while. The show was kind of wild, we rehearsed before but it was to a good extent freestyle. I had no crash or ride cymbals, just a pair of high hats. Pete demanded that........ That means I did a lot of tom-tom work.....tribal-esque... Florian from Hamburg was playing the saxophone and Uwe the guitar. Sascha was doing the bass and Pete was singing.......”World in Chains!!!”....... The rest of the bunch I don’t even remember. We had a few pillow cases we opened up and tons of goose feathers were flying around in the club.....it was a mess....pretty cool. The recordings were done in a proper 24-track studio and we recorded a full length album worth of material. At one point I did a metal percussion overdub and hit my thumb and lost my nail a few days later. VERY PAINFULL......!!!

So why did you split and how did KMFDM start?
Back then, Pete went back to the states and took the tapes with him....that was the end. It was a unique trip and everybody was fine with that I guess.... Sascha and I were hanging out anyway so we continued to hang and start to do stuff ourselves. In the early stage we just used a drum machine and I and Sascha’s former girlfriend became our singer (Sabine Tamsadi, now living in Berlin, I am still in touch with her). You can hear her voice on the KMFDM 84-86 cassette I put together. I already had a background in electronics doing primitive programming with a Pro-One and a Roland TR-808 drum machine in Frankfurt working with the singer of “E=MC2” on a project before I moved to Hamburg. The drum machine was triggering the Pro-One and I had to push the keys while running to get the bass melody right. It was the pre-Midi times, hard to believe.......Later Sascha and I were hanging out with Raymond Watts, who had some electronic gear in Hamburg in a cool studio set up and we started to jam with him. Some of the material ended up on the first record “What Do You Know Deutschland”.

I opened up for Missing Foundation in later years with a side project I had with Guenter Schulz in the late 80’s and early 90’s called “Svetlana Ambrosius Quartet” which was a girls name we got out of a cheesy novel.