Kreidler - Tank

Jeden z najważniejszych obok To Rococo Rot, Tarwater i Mouse on Mars pionierów post-rocka i nowej elektroniki w Niemczech powraca z nowym materiałem.
Kreidler to zespół, który istnieje już 17 lat (na początku na basie grał tam także Stefan Schneider z To Rococo Rot i Mapstation) i po tak długim czasie muzycy rozumieją się intuicyjnie, dlatego mogli sobie pozwolić na niezwykły eksepryment: nagranie płyty w pięć dni i zmiksowanie w trzy...
Minimalizm, elektronika i transowość to nadal 3 podstawowe cechy muzyki Kreidlera.

A simple plan: five days recording, three days mixing. One would hope that after over fifteen years of playing together, the band might has acquired a certain degree of dexterity. They call it concerted action, or stringency. In the knowledge that one can rely on the other.
Even for the last album “Mosaik 2014” the band shut themself into their own Shed in The Park studio in Cologne for five days without any warmup and began recording. In the end they wound up discarding the first pieces, but from day two onward there was enough on tape. The digital mixing then dragged on for twelve months, however.
This time was meant to be different. The band was geographically divided equally between Berlin (Alex Paulick, Andreas Reihse) and Düsseldorf (Thomas Klein, Detlef Weinrich). For a preparatory session, they met for three days in June in the ballroom of Festsaal Kreuzberg, in the capital, Berlin. The actual recordings took place in September 2010 at Tobias Levin’s Electric Avenue Studio in Hamburg. The attitude, however, remains thoroughly Rhenish.
The idea behind the simple plan, of course, is rock ’n’ roll – the energy of a live show captured on record. But it must sound good. Especially the drums. And Tobias Levin is the man for the job, a master of miking and a multiplier of the moment. Kreidler know what they wanted: first take, no shake. Followed directly by mixing in Kreuzberg with Hannes Bieger,
namely analog, on tape. A bit of editing work was needed nevertheless,
and in the end the post-production lasted eight days.
So what do the pieces mean? Well, the titles may offer a few hints. A dystopia? In some places, perhaps. A positive utopia? In other places, for certain. A description of the present time? Even that. But let’s wait a while. It's still so fresh. Everybody is still so close to it.
It’s easier to talk about technical matters, about the distinctive compositions, and the arch they traverse, two times three over the course of the album – Kreidler think in terms of records and in the arithmetic of the great disco albums by the likes of Saint Tropez or Patrick Cowley, or “NEU! 75”, examples from the ranks of legendary six-song albums – or
talk about the unpolished wildness in Tobias Levin’s studio met with the controlled artificiality of a Hannes Bieger, all mastered to the appropriate dimensions by Bo Kondren, or talk about the unsettling sublimity of Andro Wekua’s painting, in which the whole thing is packaged.
“Tank” is a continuation of Kreidler, of course. Indeed, “Tank” does relate to the narrative of “Mosaik 2014”, but “Tank” also deals with the break from that narrative. And in some respects the album recalls Kreidler’s very first effort, “Riva” from 1994, which may lie in the pace of its development, or the fact that they have tried to keep the structure of the
pieces simple and direct, that they used the computer more as a canister, a container or a vessel and less as an operating room. And of course, the fact that Kreidler has once again become a four-piece band, a band with a clear understanding of roles: a drummer, a bassist who can also reach for the guitar, a keyboard player and a man for the electronics.