Kyle Fischer

When Caithlin [De Marrais] and I first began talking about the record that became Open Ground, we came up with the preposterous idea of doing it under a pseudonym.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, but the music we had been making with William Kuehn in the past five years as Rainer Maria didn’t cop to such a past. Rather it seemed to have drawn itself up out of collegiate Midwestern muck, fully formed — characterized by the harmonic sensibilities of a few of us living in Chicago’s extended sprawl, and galvanized by our shows together.

At that time, none of us knew anything about music — too much musical knowledge was in fact distrusted, so together we made the only music of which we were capable. I still think of it as an indigenous, inevitable music. To do otherwise in that time and place would have been impossible.

I hadn’t yet begun to reflect on how my dad’s Willie Nelson records had colored my hearing, or Harry Chapin my sense of lyrical narrative, or what were the deleterious effects of hearing white protestant church music 52 times a year.

Other than that, as a kid (being as far as I could be from the centers of cultural manufacture on either coast, where nuanced cultural artifacts were produced and disseminated) there was only pop radio — which had to be gripping and immediate in its effects in order for me to be able to even hear it at all through my FM clock-radio. Sure, boomboxes had been invented, and mix tapes fostered burgeoning individual musical tastes, but at the time nobody had any money to buy anything anyway.

What Caithlin and I were getting at — however obliquely — with the concept of pseudonyms was that we were beginning to draw music from other, very different wells of experience. I see now more broadly that Rainer Maria is the name of the music created when three particular people stand in a room together and say, "Yes! Now!"

As for Open Ground, I can comfortably affix my name and take the blame for it. Except of course for Cait’s numbers, which are her own glorious fault.
— Kyle Fischer, 11/26/01