Twenty years Colour Haze have been on their backs. During this time the Munich band around singer and guitarist Stefan Koglek played their way into the top ranks of the international stoner rock scene with a series of great albums. A position that she consolidates with her latest recording "To The Highest Gods We Know". Between bringing the new generation to bed, the trouble with the local cultural department (which forces the band to leave the building with the newly furnished studio after a short time) and the work for their own record label (Elektrohasch), Stefan Koglek finds the time to chat about the band and their latest studio work.
eclipsed: The recordings for your last album "She Said" were accompanied by many difficulties. How'd "To The Highest Gods We Know" go?
Stefan Koglek: Last time we recorded the album three times. We'd kept building our studio, bought an expensive mixer. This time everything went very smoothly. Nothing stood in the way, we could concentrate on the recording, kept the mixing deliberately simple. We just wanted to have fun recording.
eclipsed: On "She Said" you have integrated new elements into your Stonerrock. Now you go one step further: The title track - after all the longest on the record - consists of acoustic guitars and strings, all of them new stylistic elements for you.
Koglek: I don't really see it that way. We wanted to make a normal Colour Haze album like we used to. Everything should be deliberately simple, without any conceptual claim. Light and easy. Most of the tracks were created in our classic style as band improvisation. Only "Call" and the title track were set up in the studio. The title track also represents a conclusive development for me, because I had been working with oriental improvisations based on the twelve-tone technique for a long time. But we didn't want to show that we could do anything else. Ultimately, the question is what serves the melody. In the end, all that matters is that the music is beautiful.
