The Hamburg art rockers Sylvan do not bake small rolls. Like her showpiece work "Posthumous Silence" (2006), the new album "Home" is a large-scale concept work. It joins the ranks of concept albums like Pink Floyd's "The Wall", Marillion's "Brave" or Steven Wilson's "Hand. Cannot. Erase" existential crises, individual destinies to the topic have.
Sylvan's last album, the "Sceneries", released in 2012 and divided into five "chapters", left each of the musicians plenty of room for their own ideas: Each member (including guitarist Jan Petersen, who has since left the band) was a musical and conceptual supervisor of one chapter each. The most recent recording "Home", on the other hand, is once again a total effort and a genuine concept album with an overarching, ordering theme: it is about the individual's search for home and security in a threatening world. In this interview singer/lyricist Marco Glühmann, keyboarder Volker Söhl and bassist Sebastian Harnack shed light on the origin and content of the work.
eclipsed: How did you approach the concept of home?
Marco Glühmann: It quickly became clear to us that we were heading in the direction of a concept album because the compositions were coherent. Then the search for the concept started. Like "Posthumous Silence", it's about a protagonist.
eclipsed: What does she experience?
Glühmann: A pregnant woman gradually recovers her repressed childhood memories from newspaper clippings she finds at home. This leads to emotional arguments about who you are and what I can offer my future child in terms of home and security.
eclipsed: How'd you figure that?
Volker Söhl: Through a discussion. It was clear that it should be about psychological coping with fears. Fears for the future, but also hopes. The very cinematic story around the house, the newspaper clippings found in the first song "Not Far From The Sky" in a box in the attic, all this came into being afterwards.
