TRAIL - 100% Live, 100% DIY

23. April 2018

Trail Underground

TRAIL - 100% Live, 100% DIY

Trail are a new quartet (Hergen: Gitarre, Henning: Gitarre, Jan: Bass und Nils: Drums) from Darmstadt, who missed www.trailmusic.de the five attributes psychedelic, stoner, blues, post and rock on their own website and now presents their debut album "Spaces", which presents a furious mixture of stonerrock, new artrock and alternative rock. eclipsed introduced the band in the rehearsal room.

eclipsed: Trail has been around for three years. How does it feel to have suddenly released an album?

Henning: It's something special with us, because three of us four have been making music together for 15 years. We only make the music we want. Everything is designed casually. It's a great thing that we now have an album out of it. And the fact that it has met with such a positive response is something we are celebrating quite well here.

eclipsed: You're not quite the youngest anymore, are you?

Henning: Between 30 and 55. Nils is the youngest with 30, Hergen is the oldest with 55 and Jan and I am both 34.

eclipsed: Your debut album "Space" doesn't sound like the debut of a band at all. That sounds so ripped off, so mature, so cool. Where did this come from?

Nils: We've been making music together for 15 years. Henning's my big brother, too. So we have been making noise together for a long time and have always tried to record the whole thing. Of course, this was not always affordable without a studio in the past. But we took the stuff with us. Because we play together for so long and jam a lot, which you can hear on the record, we are instrumentally very well tuned to each other. We used to do the recording all the time. Our plate is completely self-produced. Self recorded, mixed and mastered. The album is also completely recorded live. Because we had always been involved with recording, we didn't feel like overdubbing or recording things in isolation. We said, "We'll do it live." What came out of it is Trail live and we call it "Spaces".

eclipsed: The tracks on the album don't have titles, only numbers and that also gets mixed up and with gaps. Why don't the tracks have names?

Jan: Nils always has project names that no one can remember because they don't make sense. Henning, Nils and I had already played with singers in different constellations before. Now, without a singer, we have also detached ourselves from lyrics and the idea that it must be linked to something linguistic. We then gave the songs numbers. We actually number the ideas we collect very strictly. If we then actually implement the ideas and work them out into a song, the numbers just stay the same. On the album we redesigned it compared to live. It has to fit on a record, of course.

eclipsed: The album goes to "9." The numbers "3", "5", "6" and "7" are missing. Will they ever be heard again?

Henning: The "6" and "7" are available in an ancient Christmas live version on our Bandcamp page. We noticed that "6" and "7" fit well together, so it became "6.7". "5" no longer exists. That was a song we started jamming, but then it drifted away. We jam a lot and this results in more solid ideas, which are then built into the set. Live we regard all songs as a holistic set. That's why they're just numbers. I want everyone to think their own way. We don't want to charge anyone by any names.

Jan: We only play the "3" live. For us this is an intermediate piece, a bit bluesy, something to have fun live.

eclipsed: One of your YouTube movies starts with the motto "100 % live, 100 % DIY". Is that your principle or is it born out of necessity?

Henning: For us, this is an overall concept with the rehearsal rooms. We've been rehearsing here for five or six years. We were very lucky that the west wing of the building was extended and we were able to furnish our own room. We've set up our own studio here, so to speak. Nils has been involved in sound engineering for ten years now. For us it is the holistic, from the recording to the video to the music. We only want to do what we feel like doing and what we can do ourselves. We think that this is the only way to create the authentic trail. It is not born out of necessity, but should be so.

Nils: That's why we did the live recording. 100 percent handmade. Everything on the record is selfmade except for the very last remastering. This is what we want to live and embody. That's what we're bringing to the stage. The CD is not that far away from the live set. It's just a total package.

eclipsed: What if a record label comes and wants to sign you?

Jan: Good question, we haven't dealt with it yet. The vinyl will be released by Clostridium. This is a small label with a wonderful idea. It's run by just one person, and that fits our concept. Behind Clostridium there is only one person who simply wants good music. Of course we want to spread our music and bring it to the people. I think we're too old to still have those rock star dreams. That's when the train started to run. Even the music we make is far too special.

eclipsed: Your website says psychedelic stoner blues post rock. Is it that simple? Or that complicated?

Henning: I think it's one word too many. I don't know which one. Somehow you have to put a sticker on it after all.

Jan: I thought it was aligned with the Google search algorithms. But these are also things that are reflected in our music. That's where I see our roots. Postrock is a stamp that others have given us. None of us would've figured that out ourselves. We've got a pretty good mix. Because Hergen is a bit older, his focus is more on the eighties. Henning, Nils and I have a past in grunge. We find ourselves in the Stoner, with the psychedelic element. Our songs are quite different and this mixture is what makes it different.

Nils: We're not trying to hit a genre. We just do trail. We do our thing.

eclipsed: What does your musical socialization look like?

Henning: For me, the grunge with Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains was very formative for a long time. Guitar-wise I still like Mike McCready, the guitarist of Pearl Jam. But now I also like the stoner like Kyuss or Queens Of The Stone Age. Also there the older things. Newer stuff not so much, it's like ass-wiggle music to me. We all consume an awful lot of music right across. Nils even managed to get me a little into the hip-hop direction. I've heard from a hip-hopper that the bands I've met are not hip-hop at all. We hear a lot of music and its elements flow into Trail. That's quite normal.

eclipsed: What are your plans now? What's coming?

Jan: First of all we want to bring some live gigs to the start. We want to advance the coming season. The record will come soon. Let's have a release party. The guys from Tag & Nacht-Media, who are also part of the big community in the building, shot a video for number "8" last December. This video will be released soon. It'll be a while before they're done with it. So record, gigs, video. The full package. Those are the plans. There will also be T-shirts and bags from us.

*Interview: Bernd Sievers