Electric Orange, active since the early 90s and with many releases on their credit side, are an integral part of the German neo-psychedelic and neo-krautrock scene that can no longer be imagined without. The quartet from Aachen, consisting of keyboarder Dirk Jan Müller, guitarist Dirk Bittner, drummer Georg Monheim and new bassist Werner Wieczorek, plays big with the current album "Psi-Hybrid" and reveals the background.
eclipsed: In contrast to your last albums, you constructed "Psi-Hybrid" less improvised and more piece by piece. Why the different approach?
Dirk Jan Müller: After many years of more or less improvisation, we had the feeling that we had to do something different and work more or less the way we did before the "Netto" album. There have always been phases in our history where we changed our way of working.
Dirk Bittner: Well, at the beginning of this album there was our psychedelic fire, which once again flared up with fresh wind due to the personnel change. But it was important for us not to preserve any rehearsed parts, but to record the "emergence".
eclipsed: How has this approach played out?
Müller: Shorter songs that get to the point faster. The effort is of course much higher and everything takes much longer. That's why the recordings took almost two years.
eclipsed: There are now also flutes, a saxophone and slide guitars - instruments that are rather unusual for you. Were you looking for new forms of expression?
Georg Monheim: If you look into the past, you can always find "unusual" instruments in the sound recordings of Electric Orange. I would call it more of a stylistic device.
Bittner: There was already a flute and also saxophone sounds on Electric Orange. But the kind and presence of flute and sax in the current pieces is really new.
