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| Foto: ONUK/ Bernhard Schmitt |
Idag gästar Ralf Jesek och hans I-M-R bloggens serie om musikminnen. Bandet, där Ralf är sångare, släppte för ett tag sedan minialbumet Follow the Ruins, som imponerade stort på mig.
Beside all the usual bands and artists that have influenced me - and almost every band of our genre - (The Cure, Joy Division, Fad Gadget and so on), I personally made my very first contact with a bit darker music in a rather unexpected way. I was thirteen, I think, when my sister's boyfriend introduced me to an Austrian singer/songwriter called Wolfgang Ambros. He had released an album with the indicative title Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof (Long Live the Central Cemetery) in the early seventies and one track of it impressed my teenager ears extremely.
The song was called Heite drah i mi ham (Today I Commit Suicide) and was a very beautiful tune with a great melody and an absorbing atmosphere that walked on the edge between sadness and relief. As the song title reveals: it was about a man who lies down in a bathtub full of warm water, slits his wrists and waits for his death. There is no explanation why he does it, there is no assessment, there is just the description of the situation. In calm words. And the lyrics end with the phrase "Freedom only means that you can leave whenever you want to". And I sat there and was gobsmacked, because I never heard such a song before. It was the very first song that really catched me, opened my mind and aroused the melancholia in me. So, thanks to Vienna!
/ Ralf Jesek, I-M-R
Lyssna på Follow the Ruins här nedan!
