RPWL - Silver lining in the german artrock sky

RPWL - Silberstreifen am deutschen Artrock-Himmel

A good twenty years ago RPWL stepped into the limelight with their debut album. Their album "God Has Failed" completely revived the art rock after the Floydian model in German lands. Now the band from Freising celebrates their anniversary with a live recording - in Corona times only for the living room at home. Singer/keyboardist Yogi Lang and guitarist Kalle Wallner talk about the new recording, look back at the time of the album's creation and also tell about the special relationship between RPWL and the Aschaffenburg eclipsed circle.

In the millennium year 2000 God failed - at least in the eyes of mastermind Yogi Lang, who lamented the painful loss of his father on "God Has Failed" and therefore asked questions about divine justice. With this concept album, the mere Pink Floyd cover band became RPWL, named after the initials of its founding members drummer Phil Paul "Pablo" Risettio, bassist Chris Postl, Karlheinz "Kalle" Wallner and Jürgen "Yogi" Lang. Since then a lot has changed. Not only in the band line-up. RPWL have released seven more studio albums, including some large-scale conceptual works, more archive or Pink Floyd homage discs and many increasingly multimedia-prepared live performances along with accompanying live documents.

Live concept for the living room at home

The ongoing pandemic has now put a huge spanner in RPWL's works: a big tour lasting several weeks was planned to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the debut album, everything was prepared, the band was well-rehearsed, but a cancellation was unavoidable. So the musicians decided to do a professionally recorded and filmed live studio session of the whole album for home cinema. How did it feel to be slowed down so much by the virus? Yogi Lang describes the mood thus, "It was a tough blow, especially because the 'Tales From Outer Space' 2019 tour was going so extremely well. Not only because it was well attended, but because it felt so great behind the scenes in particular and now everyone was really looking forward to finally hitting the road again."

So, relatively spontaneously, they made a virtue out of necessity. "If our audience couldn't come to us, then we wanted to at least get home to our audience this way," Kalle Wallner explains the live recording approach. "For this reason, instead of the cramped home studio, we rented the Luitpoldhalle Freising, where we had already recorded 'A New Dawn' in 2015. This time we didn't stand on stage, but in a circle in the middle of the hall. We didn't just want to do a 'living room' or streaming concert, but we wanted to create great images and an equally great atmosphere."

RPWL - In Your Dreams (official)

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