Sankt Otten Bio
Back in the year 2000 the times were golden: freestyle electronics were enthusiastically embraced, labels for strange music were founded out of the blue, everyone suddenly felt able to realise his or her ideas easily with newly accessibly digital technology. The blueprints were well established. It was easy and smart to play with all the elements of pop history and rearrange them like lego cubes in the musical playground. Nonetheless, it was foreseeable that the situation would implode sooner or later. Not that the music necessarily suffered, but the sheer amount of available material overwhelmed the listener. One year later the search for relevance and clear definitions for the “sound of now” dominated the signings. Playfulness and an ironic distance from pop history took a backseat.
After the brilliant debut on eleganz – the 12″ vinyl “Stille Tage im Klischee” (quiet days in the cliché, playing with the title of Henry Millers studies on bored hedonism) and the follow up album “Eine kleine Traurigkeit” (a small sadness), both 1999, Sankt Otten seemed to have been sacrificed on the altar of trendiness and underwent several changes: from the singer/songwriter duo to an electronic solo project, of which the Retinascan 3″ CD-R “Zuhause fühle ich mich wie ein Tourist” containing remixes can be seen as a document, to the band lineup of nowadays, there has always been activity, and Stephan Otten, head and hands of the project, always fought for the survival of his sound. With “Wir können ja Freunde bleiben” (Let’s remain friends) he collects the pearls of his work from the years 2000 to 2004, where the most characteristic element apart from the incredibly sensitive drumwork of Otten himself – may be the surfy twangy guitar of Oliver Klemm (of “Pendikel” fame), winding through the recordings like a thin red line.
If you listen to “Wir können ja Freunde bleiben”, you will find 11 timeless instrumentals from the realms of cinematic pop, slingering between the poles of the huge legends – Morricone, John Barry, Talk Talk – and the modern adaptors – Portishead, Bohren und der Club of Gore, David Holmes, always a world apart, but never irrelevant.
“Wir können ja Freunde bleiben” is due for release through Hidden Shoal Recordings in January 2007. The album’s first single, “Fremdenzimmer” will be released December 6th, 2006.
Thanks to Burkhard of Retinascan
