Scaremonger [Artist Profile]

August 23, 2024 metatron

Scaremonger Artist Profile – the artist of the first release on Praxis Records from 1992.

Artist profile of Scaremonger, a 1992 pseudonym of Christoph Fringeli, which he only used for the first ever Praxis release, and the subsequent remix EP.

Having arrived in London at the end of 1991, Christoph had already worked on some “hardcore techno” tracks in the closing months of the year.

Already in the late 80s his musical direction had shifted from post-punk to more electronic noise and dance oriented projects, a good example of which was The Metalhouse Masterbeats by Melx (Vision 19, 1989), but also the direction his band Fluid Mask was taking with their last EP Flesh Sparks to the Beat (Vision 29, 1990). With fellow Fluid Mask member Stefan Anton he produced the Mask Media EP which came out as a white label only release in 1992, when CF had already moved to London, and which would be the last release on the Vision label.

Scaremonger directly picked up on the work done with Mask Media, but developed the sound under the influence of the latest releases from the UK and Germany and escalated some of the ideas of what hardcore techno could be in 1991/1992. But the whole range of influences included underground music through the ages and cult movies like Videodrome and Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer.

It was Miles Miles from Bourbonese Qualk who suggested the name Scaremonger to CF.

Scaremonger EP the first release on Praxis Records 1992

As with the previous Vision material the Scaremonger EP (Praxis 1) was finally mastered in spring 1992 by Alex Buess in his wwolf 2.8.1. studio. Soon after test pressings and a white label edition of 300 copies was made. The official release came out at the beginning of December 1992, distributed by SRD.

Kris Needs who was writing a page of reviews in the black music monthly paper Echoes, charted the Scaremonger EP at number, much to our delight!

Praxis Records · Scaremonger EP [Praxis 1]

The second release credited to Scaremonger was an EP of remixes of the first track on the original EP, titled Soon We All Will Have Special Names.

In particular the remix by Lagowski and Ubik became a bit of a club hit in 1993, with many DJs spinning it at places like Eurobeat 2000 and other nights that were featuring the harder Euro-style techno of the day. The other remixes were by Bourbonese Qualk, and the secretive DJ NoDoz!