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New album: "SOFA SURFERS"
An album without a name, simply >Sofa Surfers<. “The Red Album“, that’s how Wolfgang Schlögl, Markus Kienzl, Michael Holzgruber and Wolfgang Frisch refer to it, somewhat playfully and yet quite full of paternal pride, because of the fire brigade locker that graces the cover.
Three and a half years after „Encounters“, an album of HipHop/Dub-excursions into the dark territories of the soul, full of droning towers of song and recorded with the help of various vocalists, the Viennese quartet releases a new album that largely dispenses with computers and effects devices and that features a single voice. Once again the album will be released by Klein Records, a label the band has been amicably associated with since its early days. The aim for the new album was to stress the band character of the Sofa Surfers and to go back to basics: “What we were after was a sound that didn’t need any effects to hide behind. We wanted to have the sound sources to be presented in a rather naked manner, so to say.“
Sparsely arranged for guitar, bass, and drums only, the album’s opening might well originate from some dynamic postrock band or, as Wolfgang Schlögl had envisaged the band during recording “like a hardcore band after the noise has abated“. Just when listeners have adapted their expectations to this exciting sonic environment, however, a shift occurs: quite suddenly a voice drifts in, shortly grating against the music, before it beautifully falls in tune with it. It is the voice of singer, dancer, and choreographer Mani Obeya who, after various adventures in London and New York, has recently alighted in Vienna. Not only does his voice lend the new album a soulful warmth, it also helps to give it a clear structure.
>Sofa Surfers< is an extremely compact album. And yet, its combination of a band not entirely disinclined to rock and a voice that, in its broadest sense, recalls R’n’B, makes for music that dares to venture pretty far out. It is music that isn’t made for specific places, that is neither club nor home music, that simply is there, that simply is. It is not unlikely that it will create its own rooms, that it will find a space entirely of its own. At any rate it is rather rare to encounter music so self-contained these days. Somewhat surprising, this, even for a band such as the Sofa Surfers that keeps reinventing itself with each successive album. But then again, maybe not: “It’s different all right, but it does sound like a Sofa Surfers album. The feeling is the same.“
The good feeling among the four musicians, too, is unshaken, possibly better than ever before; no mean feat after nine years in a band. After a plethora of solo activities and family leaves and while visual artist and fifth Sofa Surfer Timo Novotny worked on the “Life In Loops“ film project, last December saw the Surfers get together again, each member somewhat changed and thus curious about the others. One decision was quickly taken – “We’ll do it all together“. This time it wouldn’t be a matter of exchanging computer tracks but of playing together, of capturing the live feel of a musical partnership in the studio, too. After all, the Surfers had always regarded themselves as a band. “The desire to record an album that captured a transparent band sound had been there from the beginning – we had merely failed to achieve it before, at least the way we wanted it.“
Which is why, after a period of rehearsals and experimentation, the band moved to a major studio normally used for pop production. The resulting album proved them right.
The album defies definition – somehow melancholic, warm, yet gloomy in parts, intimate... the music of the Sofa Surfers 2005 is still what it has always been – a musical and emotional no man’s land. Some words, however, force themselves on listeners – very intense, very beautiful and not quite like anything else. |
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