 |
| Terraplane: Chris O, Andreas, and I, Wernigerode in early 2005 by Koma K |
I'm taking a little detour here, back in time, because I thought it might be interesting to write a few words about the "Into The Unknown" predecessor which had the promising name "Psychedelic Wonderland". As already mentioned, this was already our second attempt to record an album. By then we had released a bunch of demos and EPs, all in a more or less chaotic manner. I just have the feeling that my whole life a kind of impatience, but also uncertainty, haunts me. Terraplane was a very creative band with high song output, and under different circumstances we could have had three full albums. At that time it was easy to write songs. I remember rehearsals where we made two new tracks in a few hours, just like that, without discussion and difficulties, which in later band constellations should make me almost despair. Now you can argue that these songs surely had simpler structures, but in the end everything is music and should be fun in the first place, right?
 |
| Mr. Oelke even smoking at vocal recordings? And me with my 200EU Stagg guitar and Marshall JCM900. |
After recording two EPs, respectively a discarded album ("Orange Sunshine", March 2004) and an EP ("War", May 2003) in a small studio in the sleepy Harz village Ruebeland, the new album was to be recorded in Alex Grothe's Radio Moon Studio. Grothe was an old buddy of Chris O., but like Jens Martinek from Ruebeland more familiar with hardcore and metal sounds. Whether this was all such a good idea? Grothe was also at the very beginning of his studio activity, but I think it was the usual money problems and lack of alternatives that made us start recording there in December 2004. And I'll say it in advance, it turned out to be pure chaos. The studio was located in one of those old GDR buildings, abandoned and quite run down, near the edge of the small town of Wernigerode. To get there, you had to fight your way through all kinds of pile-up and some of the technology, including the heating, worked only imperfectly. We actually played partly at temperatures around zero, without heating! On some of the photos you can see me with a red glove, which I wore the whole time because my hands were always so cold.
 |
| Andreas a.k.a. The Butterfly in our rehearsal room where we recorded the rest of the album |
While we were almost despairing of the otherwise quite fluent songs, Grothe finally moved with the studio to a new location, a commercial building, where after a short time most of his equipment was stolen! Oh, how lucky we were ... We concluded with a short harmonica recording in his "Plattenbau"-apartment, but after that decided to work on the raw material ourselves. And of course none of us had a clue. I fiddled around in Cubase, but I didn't really know anything about mixing a band. We were also missing the basic tracks of three essential songs, which we recorded in our rehearsal room with only room microphone on a Tascam 4 track tape machine. It was all kind of sketchy, but I wanted to learn and worked on the album quite eagerly, taking Grothe's raw tracks and trying to make the best of it without knowing what I was doing. I had zero knowledge of a drum kit. At that point I couldn't even name its parts. And the bass recording was riddled with constant stuttering noises. All rather poor conditions, and yet with the help of my Boss GT-3 guitar effect I built quite a sound collage of psychedelic guitars around it, but the overall sound remained modest.
 |
| Recording in zee days of olde: Alex Grothe in his original Radio Moon Studio |
Nobody knew what mastering meant and if it was needed, so when the recordings sounded halfway okay, they were burned to CDr and only about 100 copies were spread among fans. But nobody was really happy, although I still think that some of the best Terraplane songs are on this album in articular. I tried for years to make a re-release of at least some of the songs, but always failed. Maybe it's still a task for the future, but probably we will never again capture the special mood of that time. Well, I tend to a certain nostalgia, but every album is a witness of its time. I find it a bit difficult to offer the album to the public today, but you can listen to it on Youtube. That was a very different time, virtually without the internet, isolated in rural central Germany with the heads full of fluff and vague ideas what you could achieve with this music. There was no big scene, everything was actually still in the making.
 |
| Recording is a hard task: Chris O, Koma K and Andreas exhausted from the job |
We were a funny bunch really, Chris O. the dreamer and blues fan, chain-smoking Andreas with his impressive record collection and the most peculiar drum-style I know, our pseudo-manager Koma K who was more like a kind of roadie after all, and me this very insecure boy who put far too many notes into his solos, far too quickly ... Once on the way to a Queens Of The Stone Age-concert in Hamburg, while they were really taking off with "Songs For The Deaf", Koma K said something to me that I will never forget for the rest of my life: "Man, you've got so much talent! What are you doing with your life?" and I still ask that myself sometimes, after all the crazy and crazy good things I experienced later with SBE. Professional album recordings, worldwide tours and concerts etc. Life is crazy really! You have to take the opportunities as they appear ...
 |
| Terraplane, on our way into the unknown ... by Koma K |
