Men of Station

The details are still hazy, but somewhere outside of Toronto in early 2004, on a stretch of uninspired highway leading to the U.S./Canadian border, a computer onboard a large tour bus spontaneously combusted. Some point the finger at the driver (an aspiring reality show auteur), others blame a faulty battery, and most hold a small stuffed fox accountable. But however it happened, themselves and the Notwist were stranded. Dates were cancelled. Meals were skipped. Shady motels were booked in below-freezing weather. The fox was dead. It was the fifth breakdown of their joint tour—the latest in a series of minor disasters—and somehow out of this two-day layover between distant somewheres, a love was born of nervous laughter, shared admiration, axle grease and roasting circuitry.

From the balloon-and-burst child psychology of Adam “doseone” Drucker, Jeffery “jel” Logan, and Dax Pierson (collectively themselves), and the pinhole-in-paper astronomy of the Acher brothers Markus and Micha, and Martin “Console” Gretschmann (the core of the Notwist), emerge 13 + God—six music-fed bodies coming together for a first crack at making something from nothing. All connections formal and former cast aside, this half-dozen form a transcontinental supergroup of very human proportions: American angst and honest ability, German composition and countryside chill, and the simple recurring universal urge to locate oneself within the folds of time and place.

Our players first met over blushing cheeks at a show in Munich. Themselves were traveling, spreading The No Music (their darkly smile-twisted second full-length of free-rap, chaotic atmosphere and electro-hop) from their Berkeley, California base to Europe and points beyond. Dax’s copy of the 2002 Notwist masterpiece Neon Golden was the tour van favorite, instantly claiming Adam and Jeff as casualties of its gorgeous arrangement and dubby glitch-pop. The whispering began, and the whatifs followed, and when themselves reached their German destination, there was Markus—the Notwist’s voice and principal writer—waiting in the audience. Talk of collaboration began by the end of the night, but really, they’d been saying it with their eyes all along.