It was supposed to be a short, whimsical US trip. A few gigs where Wobbler wanted to present their new album "From Silence To Somewhere". But it came differently. Because they allegedly had false visas, the Norwegians were arrested. No entry into the United States, but twenty hours in a cell. Back home, singer Andreas Wettergreen Strømman Prestmo found his humour again in conversation with eclipsed: "Playing prog is a hard job!
Wobblers have stood for good prog, more precisely retroprog, for twelve years now. Since then the approach of the musicians has changed: While Wobbler wanted to sound like PFM or ELP on their debut album "Hinterland" in 2005, the band has been going their own way since their last album "Rites At Dawn". And now she's presented a grandiose successor. Similarities to the great role models? Unconscious at best! "Of course, at the end of the day the chromatic scale has only twelve notes. Sooner or later something will always sound like something you've heard from other bands," says bassist Kristian Karl Hultgren. "I think it's just important for us to make music with our hearts and not to be creative."
That's definitely not what Wobbler did on their new album, for which they took six years. The imaginative, detail-loving prog flows out of the boxes. Grounded, honest, in his own right, it seems. There are two main reasons why it took so long: Guitarist Morten Eriksen surprisingly left the band in 2011. The search for a successor took almost three years (Marius Halleland, a childhood friend of keyboarder Lars Fredrik Frøislie, finally got the job). The perhaps even more important reason for the long break: "We didn't put ourselves under pressure after the protracted search for a guitarist," says Prestmo. "There has always been a consensus between us that we should take as much time as we need to deliver the best we can."
