Day 6

"A perished relationship, a gift to the sea. I'm still searching the dirt for pieces of me. You could never give me what I need. I know it's hard to believe. We drift apart, we got lost in this city's sleeping streets. And I got rid of the dreams you had left inside of me."
from "Pieces of Me", the last song of our new album

This is a harmonium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonium
Since the tones are being produced by air, it sounds somewhat similar to an accordion. It was an urgent wish of ours to include this instrument on our new album. We love the sad, yet beautiful sound of it. That is exactly what we thought would fit to our new draft of hardcore.

I love classic synthesizer music like this:

but the harmonium sounds way more organic, for sure. But there's a bit of that spacy feeling in it, as well.

This is our last day at Tonmeisterei, Oldenburg and it's going to be a short day. When we finish the harmonium, we'll do a quick rough mix and then we'll leave to celebrate New Year's Eve with our friends at home. Being in the studio is a bit like being on tour. Once it's over, you're happy to go home and once you're home, you want to go back so badly.

This doesn't mean that our record is actually finished now. We will continue adding details to the sound in Robin's smaller studio in Münster. We plan to invite some friends of ours to include their instruments, whereever it fits in.

To all our sisters and brothers, have a beautiful New Year! "May nothing but happiness come through your door", as Mogwai called one of their most beautiful songs in 1999. Speaking for us, we can't wait for 2011 to come. There are so many exciting things to happen: Our new record and shows, shows, shows, ...

See you all!

"Oh no, not Finland!!"

Yesss, thanks to our friend Kimmo, drummer in the superamazing hardcore-outfit ILLS, all the Finland-tourdates are confirmed. Our flights are booked, so everything's ready to go for this adventure.

Here are the dates:
27.04.2011 Finland, Helsinki @ Semifinal
28.04.2011 Finland, Turku @ Klubi
29.04.2011 Finland, Petäjävesi @ YC Feeniks
30.04.2011 Finland, Lappeenranta @ Lucky Monkeys

And as we do it in our postpostmodern age, here's the facebook-event-page. Please everyone, help us spread the word about this!

Day 5

The ghost is him.

Today we recorded the vocals. Julian did a great job and put everything he had into his voice. That's why he was totally fucked, when he was finished. But since it's conserved now forever, I think it was worth it. Look at this crybaby:

Then we worked on some little details. This is Robin explaining a nice old-school synthesizer. Whatever he does - we love it!

Finally, we recorded a blues. Yep, that's what we did. And it will be on the record. Pascal played the upright bass, Julian did some Captain Beefheart-inspired singing, Robin played an acoustic guitar with a bottleneck and I drummed on a floor tom and a desk. The whole thing was recorded with three room microphones. We love the result. It's gonna be fun to see, if someone else is gonna like it, too.

Tomorrow is our last day in studio. And all there is to do is recording some additional feedbacks and some harmonium. Yes!

Good night to everyone. Pay tribute to the genius of Captain Beefheart!

Day 4

It's 1.30 AM and we just called it a day. That's why I am going to keep this one short.
Deni left us this morning. He's going on a trip through Europe, so now it's only three of us left here. Here's the obligatory goodbye-picture:

After finishing the bass we've just started recording the vocals. This is where we're going to continue tomorrow morning.
Here's Pascal at work:

Finally I'd like to recommend another classy tune. Enjoy!

Celebrated Summer 2011 w/ SOUL CONTROL

Here's a great announcement for next summer: From July 22nd to August 20th we're going on an extensive European tour with Soul Control (Bridge 9). It's great to be touring with such an awesome band. I remember picking up their "Involution" record and how it blew me away. It's gonna be fun to watch them play every night.
If you want to set up a show, get in touch with niclas@nodeclinebooking.com. Spread the word about this! This is gonna be a nice tour.

The Finland-dates will be announced on New Year's Eve. Watch out!

And by the way, listen to Spacemen 3, all you folks!

Day 3

The further the recording sessions proceed, the more we begin to understand what is actually happening here. The guitars are done now and we'll start recording the bass tomorrow morning. When recording the guitars we tried different effects and reworked some guitar parts. Some songs got a new atmosphere now and it really did them good.

We've just listened to everything we've brought to tape so far and we find this to be our best effort so far. In a way we've finally found our own musical language to communicate in and when trying to describe these new tunes we mostly call bands that are either connected with the term "grunge" or with the term "shoegaze". So you could say it's all revolving around the year 1990 (that's when we were 3 years old).
We're also busy discussing the title for the album. There are some serious ideas, but at this point we rather keep it to ourselves.

Who's gonna keep track of all the cables and switches? It's so good to have the genius of Robin Völkert with us. He's playing an important role in the making of this record and we couldn't be grateful enough for that.

These boys know how to keep a kitchen tidy.

This picture is meant to make you curious. There's going to be one song to worship the great band My Bloody Valentine and here's Deni recording the foundation for it.

Good night everyone. If you're staying awake for no reason, then listen to these lovely tunes.

Day 2

"Grander than castles, cathedrals or stars:
Electric guitars"
Prefab Sprout, 1997

Recording the drums and editing the drum tracks is like looking at skeletons. Even if the rhythm hits you there's no soul in it. So when we finished the drums today, we were happy to get over this first stage of development.
Deni found a suitable guitar sound very quickly. I guess, that's the part that is going to separate the new album from all our previous work. The new songs are not working with the big riff or the huge and brute sound. Now there are some subtle and not so subtle harmonies in our sound that were asking for an appropriate sound. So it was a natural progression to employ kind of a "grungy" sound.
However, listening to the first songs with a recorded guitar track was a satisfying experience to us. At this point, we are happy about the way things are taking shape.

After recording the lead guitars we are planning to add lots of effect guitars to our sound. That's pretty much the plan for tomorrow.

Here's Robin accusing us of sounding like Silverchair. We assure you we are not!

Day 1

"Offen gesagt haben wir vor
weiterzumachen als Gescheiterte bisher
In Sachen Selbstverwirklichung
offensichtlich halten welche nicht soviel davon wie wir."
Blumfeld, 1994

It feels good to be back in our favourite studio. After making our way through all the snow we arrived in Oldenburg later than we had hoped. Therefore, we didn't expect this day to be very productive. When we came here to record "Beneath Aging Flesh and Bone" the complete first day was marked by impatience, cause all we managed to do was the drum soundcheck. However, today everything seemed different to those sessions that were also preluded by hectic songwriting and losing a bass player. Today we arrived relaxed, cracking jokes and having even more songs up our sleeves than we want to record.
But even apart from that recording goes pretty fast. We have just called it a day and only two songs are missing for the drums. Tomorrow morning we'll do these songs and then guitar is up next. The drums already sound massive even at this point of production.

Look at this lovely wall paper that has already inspired numerous bands.

We made this little campfire next to the drumset.

For the rest of the night we'll become slack as apparent in these pictures.

Let's have another chat tomorrow night.

This Sunday we'll start recording our new album

We've spent the last few weeks in our rehearsal room to finish the songwriting for our new album. Now everything's ready to be recorded and this Sunday everything's finally starting to take shape. We are really excited to say the least. These new songs are really taking us a step further, so we are curious to hear what kind of band we've become meanwhile. We will keep a studio diary on this very blog to discuss newest developments, maybe post some photos or even videos, so please keep checking this page.
There's still no title for this record, although there are some ideas floating around. It will contain ten new songs in like half an hour and it will be released by Reflections Records, this is certain.

If you have some time to spare, watch this video from our anniversary-show

This was filmed by Alex/FaceTheShow.com, thank you for capturing these moments.


"You swallow shit, you swallow everything they give!"

And while you're at it, we highly recommend you to watch this video from the Unbroken show in London one week earlier. This was surely one of the most intense shows we've ever witnessed. You know that was like we were playing with The Beatles or something.