Sleeping In Samsara - a special release

At the beginning of April 2023, Steffen Weigand contacted me via email, quite unexpectedly. We had known each other for about twenty years, but were not very close until then. Our previous bands The Great Escape and Terraplane played a few concerts together, and later we often shared stages with My Sleeping Karma and SBE. The Great Escape left quite an impression on us back then, as we were about ten years younger and much less experienced musicians, and I always respected the great rhythm work of Steffen and Matte Vandeven on bass.

When Steffen contacted me, we talked about everything really, and it was like really getting to know each other after such a long time. His illness was also a topic, and I remember how I tried to give him strength with anecdotes from my life, or experiences from the past. I lost my mother at a very young age and had seen a lot of what cancer can do. At some point Steffen mentioned working on a solo project, but he also wanted to involve other musicians. He offered me two of his songs to participate where he had already worked out quite a lot. Besides his drumming there were already melodies, song-structures, etc. What was missing, however, was perhaps a bit more character (especially lyrics) and that's where I came in.

He was a bit shy and didn't seem completely convinced with these tracks yet, but I immediately recognized the potential and delivered lyrics and guitar solos in no time. In about a week I had both ready, written and recorded, much to Steffen's amazement. We were both euphoric!! In my naivety I thought that this collaboration would be so positive that it could help to heal him. Then it was time to mix, and I asked Steffen if it was okay if I published my own mixes. He allowed me to do that in one of his last emails, and then I waited about three weeks for further news from him. On the morning of June 13, 2023, however, I had to read the terrible news and was paralyzed for weeks. I couldn't believe it.

What I also have to say is that this short collaboration was the first time I had seriously worked with another musician since the end of SBE in 2020. For this reason alone, these songs are very important to me, as difficult as it was to finish them for a long time. I also have a lot of personal connections to both. It's a real collaboration between Steffen's music and my lyrics and guitar solos, which I'm particularly proud of, especially in the first track. Interestingly, these were the very first rough takes, but I never captured that spirit again, so I left it at these relatively raw recordings.

So I will release the songs as they are now... as a gift to the fans of both our bands. Unfortunately, that's all that will remain from this project.

Days of Revelation & Mystery

Original art by Oleg Korolev "Peresvet, Oslyabya, Divine Gloom" - Oil, Canvas 2006

A few memories from around the second SBE-album "Revelation & Mystery", as much as I can remember, which isn't all that much, so it's probably time before I forget the rest ;) In the album booklet you can read that the recordings took place from February to August 2011, which is only part of the truth, yet no one should believe that we were in the studio for half a year in one piece! It was more likely that parts had to be postponed due to various circumstances. At the time, the band was joining with the up-and-coming Sound Of Liberation-agency, which brought many new concerts. In March 2011 we were on tour with the somewhat legendary sludge blues band Sons Of Otis. There were a few festivals in the spring and summer, including a second appearance at Roadburn, after I had been unable to play the year before due to illness and the guys went for an improvised jam with David of The Machine instead, which made me a bit extra-nervous at the time, but apparently was going okay. We were also at Duna Jam, which I didn't particularly like as a concert opportunity, but was good for nice photos ;) and besides having to play there still had a holiday feeling, ... Also worth mentioning is the appearance at the Hanfparade in Berlin, where we were the only hard rock band to play after a series of relatively disturbing speakers (keyword: Apocalypse 2012 - that was really an issue at the time).

Back to the Revelation album, I was also going through a divorce from my then wife. On the day of the divorce we even played a concert at the Bunte Repuplik Dresden-Neustadt in the evening. I was drunk quite often and pretty miserable, and also pretty confused - things that probably contributed to the album lyrics ("two shadows in the shadows" - truly). And, as I was told later, I also went through a kind of Metal-phase, which essentially only consisted of blasting old WASP albums, Diamond Head and maybe some RATT, but I can't remember any harder stuff, which was rather happening in my youth. On the other hand, I can still remember writing many of the songs very well. 

Live in Winterthur Switzerland, "Sons Of Otis-Tour" March 2011 by Thomas Lang

The riffs on "Flipside Apocalypse" were mine, I thought them all up during a band break when the others were outside smoking. "Hangin' On The Wire" is also written by me and dates back to the band's earliest days, basically before the Long Distance-album. "Into The Black" has a bit of extra input from Richard in particular. He really liked ZZ Top back then and we basically put it together as a band. "Thirsty Moon" was in its first half by me and Hans came up with the second part quite brilliantly. The song is one of my absolute Samsara favorites of all time, although it is not a typical Samsara song as we never played it live. "Outside Insight Blues" was also a bit older at the time and had a lot of input from Richard, who wanted to reinterpret an old Jazz lick. At least I remember this characteristic bass figure that he came up with at some point. "Zwei Schatten..." was similar to "Wheel Of Life" from the previous album - a little homework of mine. While the title track "Revelation & Mystery" was quite a band collaboration. We sometimes had to rehearse without Richard. Well, it must be said that we tried to rehearse twice a week until the end, which is of course very ambitious, and Richard had other ideas at the time, for example the founding of the band HEAT ("Old Sparky") more or less falls into this period.

So Thomas, Hans and I sometimes had to rehearse as just the three of us, and that's how part of "Revelation" came about, through jamming. In fact though the last part (staccato riff) was another unrecorded idea from my time with Terraplane, when we played the "Into The Unknown"-jam with final drummer Edward Bernatek, and he probably got bored of just stumbling around in one phrase for about fifteen minutes. Richard was sometimes a bit critical back then, I remember that we even threw away an entire song (a lost song called "One Remained") because Richard simply didn't like it. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't super good, kind of a Wino-inspired doom rocker but not very well rendered out at that period. Yet there were already some (minor) difficulties in the band structure. There were first tensions between Hans and me, too ... Well, I have not much to say in my own defense. I always considered SBE to be "my band" while of course I can't be a band on my own. I didn't know any better, SBE was the only outlet for my creativity, maybe even then a solo project would have done me good. I simply didn't know any better, and to be honest I still don't know today ...

Posing for the "Into The Black" - video in a ruin in the Harz / East Germany, August 2011

Anyway, Richard already had founded a professional studio in those days. You gotta remember that the "Long Distance"-album was created with the simplest of methods on a small MacBook and with borrowed microphones. Suddenly in 2011 Richard had a complete studio with two big rooms and all the equipment you could ask for to get started. For a short time we were even the only band in his newly founded Big Snuff Studio, what a luxury! We asked Daniel Koerner, a friend who like Richard had studied at SAE Institute, to help us with pushing the right buttons or placing microphones, so that we as a band could concentrate entirely on playing the basic tracks as good as possible. And, I would say that "Revelation" was one of the most concentrated works in that line up, despite the interruptions due to concerts etc. From what I remember, we were suddenly quite "a professional band". There were even sheets on a wall where we wrote down individual parts so we didn't get lost. Now, that was completely unthinkable on the first album which was a total "Krautrock-mess" at the time.

What I also have to mention is that I was over-enthusiastic and very ambitious at this point. In addition to the band, I still worked a regular job in marketing for a solar energy company, but I really wanted to achieve something with the band. We thought about joining a bigger label - some "stoner bands" suddenly released with metal titans Nuclear Blast, which was kinda crazy back then. But then that wasn't really an option for us, so we continued with World in Sound. Wolfgang, the man behind the label, as an old Thrash Metal fan, was absolutely thrilled when he heard the album for the first time in the studio and put as much effort into promoting the album as he could. In November we went on our first really long tour, one month in a nightliner bus with three other bands across Europe - the legendary Up In Smoke-tour in 2011 together with My Sleeping Karma, The Machine and Lonely Kamel, who were, interestingly enough, supposed to be our replacements, as we had a bit of a difficult reputation at the time. Well, I admit that I wasn't always "easy" (ambitious at best), but I nor anyone in the band wasn't a diva either. Gladly we solved this and went on tour, and it remains an unforgettable anecdote, perhaps legendary in all of our memories.

Metropolis - SBE Krautrock Superjam at Zukunft Berlin-Ostkreuz, September 2011 by Martin Albrecht

Other worth mentioning events of the year 2011 would be the video recording of the song "Into The Black" in the middle of the Harz forest. We drove hundreds of kilometers through Germany for it, several times... as I said, we were ambitious. We also played two very special concerts as part of the silent movie classic Metropolis. Two nights of two and a half hours of Krautrock jams were the complete opposite of the otherwise more concentrated work back then. I think many fans who were there at the time will remember it. Wolfgang from World In Sound always wanted to get us to tour the world with this concept, had even asked an art institute, found out about funding and all that. But for me it was somehow neither one thing nor the other. As a one-off thing it was okay, but I wasn't a big Krautrock fan either, and probably won't be one anymore. So, that's that ...