Ottilie Metzger | en

In 1979, Paul Metzger drilled a few innocent holes into a Yamaha acoustic guitar. A self taught musician with 5 years of playing behind him, Metzger was growing tired of the conventions of the instrument. This lobotomy was the first of many surgeries that would follow in years to come. Strings were added, subtracted, added again; the frets of the neck were disemboweled and retrofitted with a sarod like metal fingerboard plate; paint was splattered over it, a rejigged music box was affixed to the guitar's belly, a crash cymbal mounted to its bottom. On the face of it, the...

Anna Ottilie Patterson was born in Comber, County Down, Northern Ireland, on 31 January 1932. She was the youngest child of four. Her father, Joseph Patterson, was from Northern Ireland, and her mother, Jūlija Jēgers, was from Latvia. They met in southern Russia. Ottilie's name is an Anglicised form of the Latvian name "Ottilja". Both sides of the family were musical, and Ottilie trained as a classical pianist from the age of eleven, but never received any formal training as a singer. In 1949 Ottilie went to study art at Belfast College of Technology, where a fellow student introduced her...