photo: niklas soestmeyer
how can i explain my reality in a world where paradoxes
congregate at the turn of every corner, at the turn of every page, every breath i take?
how can i explain my reality when deceit is the norm - the accountability escape route for the feudal tech overlords, politicians, chief executives and, god help us, social media influencers?
how can i explain my reality when these guardians of democracy (sic) consciously infiltrate my own belief system, pitting their logic against my own, probing with their dogma of fear at my resilience, grinning whilst offering me the medicine of prejudice?
am I really
I want to
free my imagination
in restlessness
what if
i lose control
to reinvent
thinking for myself
i need
Ge walt.
Noise icono clasts.
Art radicals.
Doppeldenk.
Euph oria, passion, rage, reflection, liberation...
Re ality as Art.
Jemand hält die Welt in Atem.
Neuanfänge
i find calm
out of chaos
revolution
09/24
helen henfling
Patrick wa
gner
in conversation with
patrick-
and they were painful changes!
helen-
I was really bored with the noise thing. I started to hate it a little bit.
And I started to hate playing guitar as well.
So I said, ‘Okay, we should think about something new’.
The big change that I made was switching from guitar to this Roland 303.
That was a very big process, not least that we then didn’t have the aggressive sound of two guitars.
I mean, it's still kind of aggressive, but the energy is created in a different way.
I had more fun playing this instrument.
It was more danceable for me, and more liberating, even just with my hands and stuff, I feel free from how you have to be when you play guitar.
when Patrick and I talked on my podcast in December 2023
- so just under a year ago -
he hinted that there were some changes coming…
p-
We didn't know the Roland machine before.
We just started thinking ‘ok, there should be a new, different sound in it, a more danceable sound’ {laughs}.
And we were asking Helen what sounds she likes and she said ‘I really like this 90’s Prodigy sound.’
So we knew that that was a 303 and then when she started working with it, we realized that it's really complicated.
You cannot just play in real time.
You really have to somehow program it, then it runs, and then you can play around with it. It's really weird.
This was all a new process for us, building it up because you cannot hear what you're doing. With this new way of creating there’s a bit of luck if it turns out good or not - and this totally fits with how Gewalt works.
You know, we do something, then it's like, ‘Oh, it does not fit at all.'
And the next moment you do something, it's full on ‘WOW, this changes everything!’.
So, we really fell in love with this approach of ‘Okay, let's try this..and hey, it's disco now, we didn't expect that’.
g-
I love this approach.
It’s like going into the unknown with your evolution.
You’re not exactly sure what outcome you’re gonna get or how you’re gonna get it!
p-
Yeah, yeah. And it was not expected or planned, it came out of what Helen was feeling. She was really frustrated playing this heavy Les Paul guitar, feeling that everything sounded like she’d played it before. When we opened for Fat White Family a couple of weeks ago, we played Schwarz Schwarz (the opening song on Doppeldenk) for the first time. It was the last song of our set and we were really excited that it was the first time with the 303 on stage. It was a sold out show, and, you know, it totally blew everyone away. Lias, the singer of Fat White Family, he was like, ‘Yeah, oh, yeah!’, because, the whole room was cheering, shouting, singing along. So, it was really amazing. And that has made us really confident about playing with the 303 live and what it will add to the whole thing.
g-
Schwarz Schwarz has got that danceable, Front 242 vibe, and it feels like a natural evolution, not forced or artificial.
p-
I mean, this is what we always did with Gewalt. We just follow the music and what's in our weird minds. I don't know if you've seen the video we released yesterday (For Egal, Wohin Der Wind Dich Weht).
g-
I have, it’s terrific. I love it.
p-
We were like, ‘Oh, I really love Notting Hill’ haha! I mean, no one would have expected this. But we love that shit.
h-
Errr….he {waves thumb towards Patrick} loves that shit. I'm not sure I love it {laughs}
p-
Ok, yes, I love that shit. I always have to cry when I watch Titanic {everyone laughs}. And you know, if it comes to our mind, then we have to do it. I don't know if you're familiar with Christoph Schlingensief? He was a director who was doing really weird theatre things, and one of the most inspiring persons, who's very naive - these are his words. He once had a show on MTV where he played Richard Wagner with a Hitler moustache. He was a really crazy guy – he’s dead now - and he always followed his mind. So, every time when we're doubting what we're doing, I always have to think of Christoph Schlingensief and remember ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, it came to our minds, so we have to follow this’. This matters, you know.
g-
Following your instinct…
p-
That's right, yeah. And the world has to do whatever the world is doing.
g-
Gewalt seems to have found itself in a position where you've crossed over musical styles, and brought different musical styles in: there’s the aggressive guitar noise like Helen said, so kinda metal/industrial and then that combined with LinnDrum’s mechanical dance groove and Jasmin’s imposing basslines like you get on Es Funktioniert. So, when you bring in additional influences, it always feels to me that it’s natural – because we’re used to your experimentation with sounds and grooves, I guess.
p-
There's still this really tough industrial stuff and the really dark stuff, like, ‘Hier, Wo Du Strahlst’, or post punkish song, like, ‘Felicita’. This could be on a Fear Farm record, for instance, or on a Joy Division record, or we even have a kind of hip hop song called ‘Das Kann Ich Nicht’.
g-
Yeah, I mean 'Das Kann Ich Nicht' has definitely got more of a metallic feel. And also the saxophone…wow
p-
Yeah, those two songs. And we were like, ‘we have to follow this’.
h-
Actually, it was more like, ‘It's not enough. We need more!’ {laughs}
p-
Yes, that’s true! I always used to hate sax, but now I love it.
​
g-
Where did the sax idea come from?
h-
An old friend of mine plays the sax and I always wanted to do something with him. And we had the idea for the last album as well, but that was totally shitty {laughs}
p-
He's really good. And he was like, ‘oh, Gewalt is noise’. But we told him that we’d got enough noise, we wanted something different. So this time we really worked together with him to get it right.
polaroids: Gewalt
p-
The mix was already almost ready. So we'd got good mixes and we were so happy because we’ve got a guy, Matthias Moeferdt, who can play everything and has been on some incredible jazz records. And we’re saying ‘No, this little piece is really made for you’. And he was like, ‘Well, I wouldn't have picked it…..but this is great, and it works!’ Our very naive, easygoing approach helped him to overcome this whole thing so that was really, really fun. It was amazing to work with him and to see how the song grew. When we mixed it, our engineer and producer, Dennis Jüngel, said “I hate sax’. And he was like, ‘Turn it down, down, down!’. And we were like ‘No way, turn it up, up, up!’ So we got him to turn it up and I think perhaps we could have done more!
g-
So is this the first collaboration of this type?
p-
Well, we did something similar with our 2017 single, Tier, when we did vocal stuff with Max Gruber (Drangsal). That was another weird idea. We had this idea for Tier that it somehow sounds like the Beastie Boys, right? We always look at our music from different angles and come up with different ideas of what to do with it.
g-
When you were writing the record, what sort of stuff was influencing you?
p-
I don't know {pauses}. I mean this whole album came out of a feeling that something is very wrong, not just in the world, but within everyone. OK, so I’ll ask you a question: when was the last time someone - a friend - just rang at your door?
g-
Oh my god. I couldn’t tell you. Years ago.
p-
Yes, exactly. We are living in a world right now where we text, “hey, can we call?”
Helen bursts out laughing
​
g -That's true. I do it myself. I’m ashamed.
p-
if you don't know a number, you're like, “oh my god, what am I going to do?”.
It's all coming from fear.
Everything and everyone is full of fear.
Simplest thing - and this is so wrong and is just one of the parts, not the big political stuff - when you call someone they’re like ‘are you crazy? You cannot just call’ or ‘you cannot just drop by!’ I'm of a generation where, if you work together with someone, you set a goal and we want to reach this goal or this point. And then you work on it.
Everyone is doing their best, and then after a while, someone says, ‘Oh, this does not work.’ And you work it out.
Now it's almost impossible to set a goal, you know. It’s like, if you were writing for a magazine for example, everyone is like ‘let's do it’. And then you ask someone if they’ve done something, and you get ‘Hey, don't be that pushy.’ People want to be involved but they don’t want to have the responsibility that comes with being involved.
g- that's very true. Great observation.
p- and this is another thing that's so bad for creative work. This is all part of art and part of life, and it all faded away, so I have no clue.
h- oh wow, yeah. I mean, I guess all of this is more of a feeling that we have. I mean we don't know how they work in in their offices. I mean, I think that those types of workers changed a lot with their work/life balance, and that's a good thing. But for us, this change makes life difficult.
g- those are really good observations. There's a phrase in English, which is that people operate from a place of fear. That's their baseline, that's where they start from. My theory on why people don’t want to take responsibility and accountability in so many areas of life is because they're scared and I also think they are fearful of their own ability, perhaps, and they don’t feel like they are qualified. I don't know, but not many people these days will put their hand up and say “I fucked up”.
polaroid: Gewalt
p-
There’s no truth anymore. This is why the record’s called Doppeldenk. People have lost all their own ideas of what they want and how they want to live. In German politics, they're talking about closing the borders right now. And the Grüns are talking about this, so they are following an AFD right wing path. And everyone knows from history that this is the wrong path, but they're doing it. Everyone knows it's not working at all. I mean, everyone sees what happened in Britain {all laugh}
g-
Couldn’t agree more. The UK has been a shitshow. Still is. Never come to terms with its racist, colonial past. Still acts like it’s the King Of The Universe.
p-
And everyone sees how well it worked in Poland when a liberal guy came in and said, ‘I don't talk about topics like immigration, it's totally not important at all.’ So, everyone stopped, and all of a sudden, the right wing is gone. This is also Doppeldenk!
h-
Especially a country like Germany, it shouldn't do that shit…it’s so weird.
photo: niklas soestmeyer
g-
This is related to some of the rhetoric around immigration and some of the other really divisive subjects: I’ve been thinking about reality and what it is. Like what makes reality.
p-
There's this nice quote from this meme, where Keanu Reeves is talking to a 15 year old guy and explaining to him the idea behind The Matrix movie. And he was like, ‘Hey, I'm just fighting for reality, against a virtual world. And the 15 year old guy says, ‘Why would you do that?’ {laughs}. I thought, wow, this is tough.
g-
As an example, some people will deny someone else’s real lived experiences, so on this hand, how can you say that when you have not and can not experience what the other person experiences, yet on the other hand, they will also create their own clearly artificial reality and try to portray it as…a new reality
It feels like these circular, never ending arguments happen so much more these days.
p-
Yeah, maybe you explained it better than we do. So this is the whole feeling of Doppeldenk, of almost all its lyrics that you're somehow trapped, more trapped than ever before. Because even if I'm right, I'm still dependent on getting the message out. And how do you get it out? What is the algorithm doing? And as soon as you start to communicate with music or art or whatever, you're in this trap.
We were at the Lollapalooza Festival Berlin last weekend and we did some IG reels. It’s the first time 10,000 people have watched our reels. The first time we went viral. It was so weird {laughs}. I mean, we all know what Lollapalooza used to be in the 90s, right?
g-
I didn’t recognize anyone in the line-up. I’m not sure what that says about me though, to be honest!
p-
Oh, it’s really weird. There were DJs playing for 50,000 people in the Olympic Stadium, okay, yeah, and they were just shooting Spotify playlists and the crowd didn't even realize that the DJ before was playing the same songs.
​​
h-
So bad, unbelievable.
p-
You sometimes heard the same song from three different DJs,
h-
It’s money for nothing.
p-
They get like 50,000 euros
h-
Minimum.
g-
You’re kidding, right?
p-
Nope. But then there was this cool Australian band called Glass Beams. That was the only “band”. They play this really cool rock instrumental. I don't know how they got on this lineup - because they have many followers, I assume. But they are a really good band, like, their show is really like a movie…
h-
They wear these golden masks and sound sort of Arabic psychedelic
p-
Yeah, and they played a great set and there were like 100 people watching them. Ridiculous. I mean, they’ve got something like a million followers - but not in Germany {laughs} - so, just 100 people including us, and we were like well, we didn’t know them before, but they’re cool.
h-
I was really wondering if there was a stage called 'alternative' that was interesting for us. I mean, we don't know, because we came very late on the Sunday. So, I think maybe there were a few bands there, but I was really wondering if there are still bands! Bands that play instruments!
p-
And then there was the K-Pop thing. So, I’ve never experienced anything like this, but I thought it must be super choreographed, whatever. But it was just like, you know….well, there was nothing going on.
h-
I thought it was really, really bad.
p-
I don’t know, but it made me think….what should we do with Gewalt? How should Gewalt work in this environment? Sleaford Mods are one of my favorite bands. Andrew presses Enter when he’s on stage and dances a lot, Jason is intense and the way the songs are written is great, very minimal, whatever, and totally interesting. Amazing words and always an amazing performance. So, I'm not a believer that musicians have to play traditional instruments and I'm not against DJs at all. I used to love Jeff Mills and Robert Hood when they were DJing. It was art. I think it's super interesting. And, yeah, it changed music for the better. You know, it brought us away from Phil Collins, and it's a new form of punk and whatever. So I'm fine with that. But if a musician is just an animator or whatever - and this is my point - especially in Germany where we are, all the guitar people on Tik Tok, when they play live, they go right, and they go left, and then they run into each other, it's just really stupid and dull. I still have this idea that if you see a band or an artist, they must have the ability to change your life. Really. When I saw the Sonic Youth for the first time, it changed my life. I was a different person after seeing them.
​
​h-
I think that I know why they listen to that. I think that especially the kids from that generation, they are so full of bad news and they’ve had this Corona thing when they were teenagers and couldn’t go out, and then the war and all this climate stuff. I think it's a little bit too much for these kind of young people, they just want to listen to some bullshit, they're just like, I don't want to think about anything more. And that's the reason which I kind of understand The other way would be to listen to musicians who are talking about that, but I think that’s too much for them. I think they are overloaded with world stuff.
g-
Obviously, I'm from a different generation, but I love listening to whole albums all the way through and, thinking about how the artist put the track listing together, you know, what was the thought process behind it….
p-
You spend hours, days, weeks on that…
g-
How did you go about it with Doppeldenk?
p-
We were super clear that we wanted to start by making a very clear point that something really changed. So that was clear. And then we were discussing really hard, and we're still discussing if we got it right or not, but at the same time and this is the paradox, we realize that nowadays, it's almost not important anymore.
g-
More people are listening to playlists…
p-
Yes, you barely find someone who's listening to the full album and most people just skip through songs.
g--
It’s true. And I hate that. But that’s the reality
p-
And especially if you have a song like Hier, which is on the second side of Doppeldenk. It takes three or four minutes before it really starts. That's really good for Spotify. Really amazing {dripping with sarcasm}. You know how Spotify counts? If you don't hear the full song, it doesn’t count it for streaming numbers. So, I think with these songs, we will end up at three plays {all laugh}
polaroids: Gewalt
g-
How is your relationship with streaming platforms and social media?
p-
I’m not sure yet. It's the first time in the last few weeks that we’ve done more social media. I was like “ok, we should do it, every day, blah, blah, blah, with….. stuff’. So I wanted to try it - not to try and look for success or whatever – but because I want to see what it does to me, to us. Like I want to experience it, see how I feel. A friend of mine, he was really good with social media. So he was filming while he's playing live, filming while he's waking up, blah blah. He was super successful with it. He was on tour at Die Ärzte Stadium, blah blah, sold thousands of records and millions of streams, and then he got depressed, and he got out of it all. He was like ‘I cannot do this anymore. I have to stop everything, I was thinking about stopping being a musician’, so I wanted to check what it would do to us. I mean we don't have many followers on Instagram, like 4,000 but this month we had like almost 60,000 views on one post. I was like, fuck, what is happening?
h-
I don't know, I don't trust it
p-
It doesn’t change a thing, but the pure amount of views, it's like a big dopamine hit, so I think we’re gonna leave soon!
h-
Uuuurgh….hashtagging all the time…..
p-
My idea was to really get out of social media on 4th October, just stop everything {laughs} and just use our email list. That's it.
h-
No, I don't think we should stop it, but we shouldn't overload it. New music, tour dates, and not all the “Hey, look at us, we are here”
g-
I think mailing lists are still good. I think they allow you a deeper connection with people, it feels more personal because someone has taken the time to give you their details rather than just press a like button.
The other thing I really dislike is the way these platforms are changing people’s behaviours. It’s so performative. You have to talk a certain way, write a certain way, use certain words, can’t use photos only videos…basically we have to mould our content not on how we want it to look but how they want it to look to have a chance of reaching an audience. And then they’ll change their rules and so we’ll have to change. It’s like being in chains. It’s so fucked up.
Thinking about the streaming platforms and what they’ve done to people’s behaviours. They’ve reduced our attention spans and so the concept of an album, to many people - not me I should add – is alien. Like I’m never going to listen to a whole album. It’s all about singles and playlists. So this is interesting, given that you’ve traditionally focused more on singles rather than albums….
p-
Yeah, true.
h-
And actually everyone started saying, ‘You have to do an album.’
​
g-
As an aside, I think, actually, you could put any of the songs on Doppeldenk out as singles anyway, I think the songs are that strong,
p-
That’s what the producer said ‘you did 10 fucking singles’.
photo: johannes bendzulla
g-
We should talk about the artwork for Doppeldenk. It is really spectacular.
p-
Jody Korbach, she's amazing.
She invited us to play at her exhibition ‘Fine people on both sides, and me’, where she was talking about how language changed in the 80s when the RAF (Red Army Faction) was strong in Germany.
She painted inside and outside of this white gallery house (NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein) in like five meter red letters.
She painted the fascist words Lieber Tot Als Rot (Better Dead Than Red).
She wanted to point out how language was back then and inside they were, like, all these Bild Zeitung quotes and everything was really full of violence.
photo: jody korbach
h-
And now that language is back
p-
Yeah, now it’s back, and yet at the same time on social media and everywhere, you're not allowed to say ‘Fuck you’.
This is super Doppeldenk: you have on the one side this emotion, but you cannot really express them.
And the funny thing about her exhibition was, with this painting outside, it took two weeks before the Antifa reacted. It was in a public place. It was in the biggest park in Aachen. But they called beforehand and said, ‘hey, we have to paint over this.’ And she was like ‘errr, yeah, you don't have to call. I did it so that you would paint over it!’
We played our set after her talk in this white room with the red letters, and she had written on one of the walls ‘ich stelle es mir sehr befriedige no ver jemanden krankenhausreif zu schlagen’ (I imagine it would be very satisfying to beat someone so badly that they had to go to hospital).
You know, like, in big red hand painted fucked-up letters we were playing our Gewalt set there, and we were like ‘this REALLY fits.
She has to do the artwork’.
And she was like, ‘I love the band, sure, I’ll do it.’
photo: jody korbach
g-
I really think that artwork is an integral part of a piece of music.
I remember the excitement at getting a new record, opening it and just looking at the artwork, the posters, the inside sleeve.
All that physicality made my heart skip beats…
p-
The record is a bit more playful. It's also a bit….naive and playful too. And I think you can see that in the artwork too….it’s the opposite of the really perfect look of Paradies, where we were super mature and smart. Now it's more, I guess, cheerful as well.
g-
I remember you told me that you recorded Paradies in like 10 days or something like that? How does that compare to Doppeldenk?
p-
Yeah, the same for the recording. The writing was more painful because of those changes we talked about.
album cover artwork: jody korbach
photo: niklas soestmeyer
h-{shaking head}
It was horrible, really horrible.
p-
We didn't practice for two years because we played 120 shows all over the world, you know, and we played and played and played and we didn't practice. And then we came to the rehearsal room. We were playing really well because we had played so many shows, but the feeling we had when we started doing new stuff was like, ‘Okay, now we’ve got new stuff and I have the feeling I have never held a guitar before.’
g-
Did you come together with songs written?
p-
I had written some beats and some lyrics and that was the main problem. I thought, I want to keep things open so that we just find our genius, you know, like, find each other’s head and heart in the studio.
h-
And it just didn't work at all.
p-
So, I went away and I wrote the lyrics, I structured the whole songs, I wrote the guitar, and then we got in with the producer. And this really worked fast.
g-
Why do you think the initial approach didn't work?
p-
Because we didn't have enough time
g-
Because of the touring?
p-
Well, we just had 10 days to do 10 songs. It was too much pressure.
h-
We were just playing and seeing what happens plus we had a bad rehearsal room. Vienna was really shitty.
p-
It was shitty. We thought of moving to Vienna, but now we're like, oh, fuck Vienna!
p-
It feels like that’s happening again now and a kind of realization that the whole music “thing” now is not working.
So, everyone is saying ‘let's just make music’.
There’s a wider understanding that the market's not working for bands, so people are getting rid of this thought that they can make a living from it or whatever and they will just play without any goal except to play.
So, this is how things in the 90s started.
This is how punk started.
This is how techno started.
This is always the best moment if something's not working, and the people will go back to the roots where it's really the essence of things.
h-
At the same time, they’re just a handful of bands
…...but change always starts with just a handful.
g-
So, the vibe in Berlin at the moment?
p-
Well, there's great bands right now. We’re hanging out with Plattenbau. They're really amazing. And friends of mine, Hope - they were on tour with Depeche Mode.
​
They're also amazing.
So it's the first time in years where there’s a new underground scene evolving, where bands are playing in small spaces. It feels a bit like the 90s, right – in a good way.
h-
Noooooo, not the 90s! OK, I mean, yeah, but the 90s weren’t as good as in the 2000s where there were so many new things just beginning
