Forest Tapes by Heated Land

Heated_Land_forest_Tapes_2023

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Heated Land – Forest Tapes
Release Date: SEP 29, 2023
Limited Vinyl (317 copies) & Digital
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„Forest Tapes“ is a new album by Heated Land. It was recorded directly to tape through just one microphone in a living room in Southern Germany and it is – we are not kidding – one of the best sounding and most soulful pieces of music we have heard in a long time.

Live performance has always been at the heart of Heated Land’s music. These recording sessions with their long-time collaborator Torsten Lang – despite being carefully engineered and rehearsed – capture the band’s essence: Andi Mayrock’s rugged, feral songwriting and lyricism at the core of timeless, ever-changing, free-flowing songs about eternity, nature, capitalism, self-knowledge, and community. 

The record’s track list is comprised of new, unreleased material and new versions of songs from their two previous albums. It has a bluegrassy mood to it, but not one of wild improvisation. The minimalism of Wilhelmine Schwabs violin suggests she carefully chose only the most devastatingly beautiful notes. Raja Ghraizi’s lead guitar playing is otherworldly. Time and again, a small choir weighs in. No drums, no overdubs, no editing. 

They are being joined by Simon Preuss double bass on the b-side of the album. Their landlord, the stone sculptor and musician Milan Lipsky, contributes saxophone to an epic version of “Off The Trees”. He wound up playing his part out on the snowy terrace through a half-open door to not disrupt the carefully balanced sound image. It was ok. The music on “Forest Tapes” turned into a cozy fireplace.

The Gentle Lurch

The Gentle Lurch “We are passing our days / Like two snails / Slowly crawling past each other / A shared office, alright / But aren’t we supposed to be brothers?” . Workingman’s Lurch, just as the title track suggests, is a pessimistic album that deals with work. Going to work, being at work, stagnation, approximating death.

It’s the third album by a band from Dresden, Germany, called The Gentle Lurch. Its members hail from the rural Ore Mountain region nearby. They like to pause in between albums until each and everyone has forgotten about their existence. Their last (double-) album stems from 2009 and Americana-UK spoke of “Dresden‘s Answer to Wilco – a sprawling, experimental epic…” with regards to it back then. Rolling Stone Germany compared them to Lambchop and Tindersticks. 

Since then, the three core members and singers Cornelia Mothes on piano, Frank Heim and Lars Hiller on various string instruments were joined by Ronny Wunderwald on drums and Timo Lippold on bass. Possibly as a consequence, the band has been overheard speaking of Workingman’s Lurch as an “honest-to-God rock record” which, most likely, is an indication of their skewed self-perception. It’s the opposite of a perfectly rounded offering. Each song has got its own will, develops its own strategy and momentum. Ludwig Bauer has written two harrowingly beautiful string arrangements and, from time to time, an obscure ‘Choir of Mothers’ expands the polyphony of voices of the band’s three lead singers.

Yet, drums and bass provide a much firmer framework for this new set of songs. They let them become more concise and, at times, louder than on previous albums. ‘Our Bodies Become The Ground‘ rolls like scree avalange from the speakers. Also, Cornelia Mothes takes up much more room on this record, confronting Lars Hiller’s stoic sing-song manner of recitation with a comforting, almost redemptive element. She also brings a previously unfound directness and pop-affinity to this record. Therebeside, plenty of remnants of the old Gentle Lurch remain: close to standstill, precariously groping, a sound like rotten wood.

Their songs are lyric-heavy and narrative. The lyrics like to twist and turn to mystery like the closing observation of a short story by Flannery O’Connor. It’s difficult to call them a folk band, but it’s also difficult to call their output experimental music. There are only three choruses on the whole album. Most tracks are like journeys from point A to point B, others level and rise like waves on an ocean. They use elements of Folk, Country and Americana, because they like their emotional directness. But they realign them into something different. At times, as confrontational as on ‘All Things Come’ which tilts from complaint over into consolation on a single organ note, changing singers as well as harmonies mid-song. There is the strangely rotating chord progression that propels ‘Cannot’, or the groove torpedoing the gospel of ‘On How To Tamp Leaks‘.

Workingman’s Lurch also marks the first time, the band has worked with an external producer. Johannes Gerstengarbe usually stands for a more polished, radio-friendly production style. It was a conscious decision to combine the band’s crude approach with his aesthetics. Mastering was done at Soundcurrent in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The almost two years of recording took place in an abandoned, former chocolate factory surrounded by old GDR-housing projects depicted in the albums artwork and which – apart from a few early 90ies satellite dishes – appear to have gone untouched by the German unity and the Quarter century that has passed.  

Then of course, the album’s title is also a distant echo to Workingman’s Dead by Grateful Dead (1970). Whereas that record could be viewed as a swansong of the innocence and cultural liberation of the 1960ies, Workingsman’s Lurch is the swansong of an unaffected,  self-sufficient life. It doesn’t describe a cultural phenomenon but a biographical one: integration into employment, the groan of material, the deadlock, the grind and creak, the repulsion of nonfunctional parts. „There was something that sat on my heart like a moth.” (Nesting)

buy Workingmans Lurch

Heated Land

Heated Land_Recording Session_ In a wider tone

This little poem by an unknown writer well catches the mood behind the music of Heated Land, a band project founded in 2012 in Dresden, Germany around the work of singer- songwriter Andreas Mayrock. Inspired by many old and some contemporary artists of genres like Americana, blues and folk, the songs of Heated Land wander through wide landscapes and little ghost towns, bringing up feelings of longing, lostness, nostalgia and hope.

“Now the heated land is cooling off
under a big black sky.
Where a cruel god pinned a million stars.

A raven sails through the roaring silence,
while the sun´s escaping the dusty soil
like faint smoke – bringing memory and song.“

Members:  Andreas Mayrock – vocals, guitar I Alexandre de Ligonnès – harp, voc I  Chrstoph Dehne – drums  I  Simon Preuß – contrabass  I  Raja Ghraizi – guitar ….   and more.