Wareika Day

In electronic music the time of bands has come again! Not just producers with laptops, but bands proper, with leaders, singers and musicians... The music of the German trio Wareika is hard to describe by any word other than "eclecticism". In the work of Florian Schirmacher, Henrik Raabe and Jakob Seidensticker it's easy to make out the dry-ish rhythms customary for the club music of the "noughties", yet behind them a genuine riot of colors unfolds. Piano, brass, rhythm guitar, assorted percussion, synth trills and vocals fold together now into dub, now into disco, now into warm melancholic deep house, now into a carnival Balkan beat. The German trio even has a cover of The Doors' hit "Riders on the Storm" to its credit.
Many rightly consider Florian Schirmacher the best alternative voice in Germany. Besides Wareika he is the "golden" voice of many projects: Federleicht, Hatikvah, Glowing Glisses and more. Wareika are released on the most varied labels: Eskimo, Perlon, Connaisseur, Tartelet. On the eve of Wareika's Moscow concert at the club Shanti, we decided to learn the details of the musicians' creative path.

It's funny that you hear Russian roots in it! That's the name of a hill in Jamaica, a sacred place, a center of the spirit. This word connects us with spiritual sources. But it also matters how it sounds – there are three syllables here, and in the sound there's a certain depth, magic…

Yes, it's unusual, but for us it's the most effective way to create our own musical language. Tracks can be born anywhere and with anyone. For example, we were recently in St. Petersburg, and Henrik decided to play his guitar – just to practice, and in the end a sketch for a new piece was born from that too. But in the studio we always work as a trio, without any rules or restrictions.

We are a fully democratic formation. We work with analogue equipment, mix the parts on the fly and listen to the result. And we decide a track is ready only when everyone likes it, and we agree that there's nothing left to add here.

And how! Jakob and Henrik decided to become professional musicians back when they met at school. They played everything from jazz to dub and house. The main instrument was the MPC sampler, but Henrik kept perfecting his guitar playing. I too have been doing music almost all my life – I play piano, drums, percussion, guitar, sometimes I even sing and work as a producer. It all depends on the band, since we all take part in many projects.

In one of Moodymann's tracks someone says the phrase "there's only one way – your way", and that's just like us – the only path that suits us is our own.

We listen to the music that comes to us on its own. Someone records a sound or a track that another person may later hear. When we hear it, we can feel where that sound came from (maybe directly from the universe?) or understand what the author wanted to tell us. For example, we worked together with Matthias Kaden (we did a remix of one of the tracks from his album). After that we played that track a lot in clubs, and perhaps we managed to transform its message and carry it to other people. This is an example of how we interact with the music that surrounds us. We live together with it, trying to get down to its foundations, to the message embedded in it. Perhaps all the music in the world has one common root, it's just that we look at one and the same thing from different angles.

After the Second World War Germany found itself divided into many parts with their own governments: the Soviet zone, the British zone… Because of this, several centers appeared in Germany, and at the same time we learned to live together peacefully. Perhaps it was precisely this that allowed us to become such a friendly country, open to creativity. Playing in an old bunker or at other venues surviving from those times, we feel a belonging to the common world of techno. Together we make the world different.

The album format can emphasize the message, make a statement more intense than what you can put into a couple of tracks. First and foremost this can be said of the disc "Harmonie Park", but in the album "Formation" too there is a certain commonality between the compositions. A single can be like that as well, if you include specially chosen original tracks on it, but singles, as a rule, are made with DJs in mind (and we're very glad that our tracks are able to expand their musical vocabulary), so remixes are more often released on them.

Mostly we use the MPC, a Prophet synthesizer, guitar and effects. That, in our opinion, is how you can achieve the most interesting sound in club music. Sometimes we can bring drums, piano, a computer or even an orchestra into the process. During a concert the main thing for us is to hear one another. First of all – the density of the sound, and then, of course, improvisation. In each track we have certain key moments where we know exactly what will sound next. But if you compare recordings of our live performances, you'll see that the same pieces sound different every time, and even have different lengths.

The idea to record a cover of Riders On The Storm came about when I happened to decide to sing this song at the Hamburger Kunsthalle exhibition. The reverberation in that space is such that I could hear myself very well – turns out I have a voice! It was like a new page in self-discovery – the very next day I came to the guys with the idea of recording a cover, and we did it immediately. As for the rights – in our version there are no samples, we played and sang everything ourselves, while keeping the song's arrangement almost unchanged.

We are right on the threshold of the start of a new chapter in music history. The music schools have just changed their programs toward working with digital technologies. Along with the album, musicians present their own language, their personality (we'd like to hope we manage this too). The consumerist approach is leaving music, and it's precisely digital technologies that gave us this. Today our music can be heard, and can inspire, anywhere in the world, and this energy comes back to us like a boomerang – thanks to those who listen to us, love our tracks and dance to them!

Wareika Day
Club Shanti (Myasnitsky proezd, 2/1)
19 November
starts at 20:00

Wareika (DE) - Live/Concert!
Leo Gross - Special Set
B-voice & Anrilov