"For 'Refugeeum', as always, we all got together, collected and developed ideas together and then recorded them," reports Black Space Riders singer/guitarist JE. "A good 110 minutes of material were created in this way. We noticed that there were some pieces that just didn't really fit into the overall concept - but weren't completely removed from it either. So we decided to put them aside and do something different with them later." And the time to introduce the runaways was now ripe. Four unreleased tracks and two remixes combined the riders to the EP "Beyond Refugeeum". The closeness to the mother album is not only shown in the title, but also in the artwork: The same image of a refugee camp in a desert landscape is immersed here in psychedelic tones.
"For people who know our music well, many things about the new pieces are unusual. For example, the third track 'Droneland', on which we experiment with a sequencer reminiscent of Jean-Michel Jarre." With "Starglue Sniffer" the band intensively explores psychedelic depths. "That the singing became the way you ultimately hear it was more a coincidence. It occurred to me to sing in my head, and I actually went through with it. My band colleagues were astonished at first, but our sound engineer was into it and said: 'Let's do that, that polarizes totally'." And so it remained with the falsetto singing.
"Ultimately, everything fit in with the master plan, which revolves around escape and arrival," says JE. "The video for 'Starglue Sniffer' shows quite well what the song is about, namely someone who wants to free himself. I imagined a young man in a refugee camp trying to escape the misery there by sniffing glue." With the spacy instrumental "VRTX RMX", a remix of "Vortex Sun", and the dancefloor suitable "Gravitation", remix of the band classic "Give Gravitation To The People", the guys from Münster complete their EP experiment.
So what happens now? "We already have some new material that will probably be on a new album. The subject has not yet been decided. But we'll probably go back to the studio at the end of the year." Good intentions.
More about the band
www.blackspaceriders.com
www.facebook.com/pages/black-space-riders
* * * Julia cousin
