Inside the Ships

VINYL FORMAT. This is the eleventh studio album by Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok aka Tarwater. On board are eleven songs that reflect the different facets of the Tarwater sound cosmos: dense soundscapes created by skillfully interweaving electronic and analog sounds. When the duo began working on the album, they initially intended to create a "Space Opera." That was not to be, but the resulting visions of the future, fictional knowledge and the distant and unknown served as the inspiration for these songs. Yet despite titles like "Inside The Ships," "Radio War" Or "Do The Oz," this is not a concept album. Tarwater have always befuddled the fanatics of stringent categorization among pop analysts. The synesthesia produced upon hearing the new album -- seeing alien worlds by means of acoustic stimuli -- is deftly created by Jestram and Lippok in their own special way. They have dispensed with coldness and overtly technoid sounds. Science-fiction folklore remains sidelined. The "otherness" is produced, for example, through the use of brass (tuba, saxophone, horn, trumpet and trombone) and other instruments that are otherwise used far from the pop-context -- such as the cimbalom. Even with these unusual elements, Tarwater's sound cosmos remains an organic whole and is immediately captivating on first listen. "Sato Sato" marks the first time that German lyrics appear on a Tarwater album. The text is taken from a track by Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft (DAF) on their 1981 album Alles Ist Gut. However, it's not really a cover: The phonetics of the lyrics serve primarily as another instrument with which Tarwater forms the song. Only the text is used, embedded within a new composition.