Extreme Music Blog

As promised this is a new update.

After a short night and some usual work it was time for another very special live event. Having packed some parcels for the mailorder I went Stuttgart downtown to a club, Merlin, where usually a lot more softer artists show up on stage. This time IKARISCHES ENSEMBLE claimed the boards that mean the world. I met up with some friends there and we had a relaxed beer first in the beautiful garden of the club. But then the band plugged in their guitars…

The music and live appearance is really hard to describe. You see a three piece, a drummer, a bass player and a very skinny guitar player who is also doing the insane vocals from time to time. As you can read on their homepage the band interpretes classical compositions which are writing for totally different instruments like piano in a very own, new way, transformed to drums, guitars and even vocals. But they also use these parts as basis for own compositions. All in all the music sounds very maniac, really insane and is very hard to follow. Some cues of the instruments even seem to be totally random – but be sure they are NOT. The only band that comes up to my mind when being ask how this sounds like is Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, but less fluently, with a bit more Jazz influences, less vocals and without any visual support (a Sleepytime Gorilla Museum show must be more like a theatre play I guess). A highlight was definitively a five piece interpretation of a composition which was transformed as described above. I did not understand the name of the composition unfortunately. But it had a weired timing and beeing musician myself I know how hard it must be to play this very staccato music in the right timing. Plus the band did it sight-read from a partiture.

Unfortunately the band has played more new songs this day which are lacking of vocals. But the encore was an old song which really works well live and you can even almost bang your head (which of course noone does on Jazz concerts, hehe).  I guess that most of the people attending this (free!) show were musicians or at least very into music, so they gave the artists a round of applause and went kind of enthusiastic when the band left the stage to get them back for the encore.

Conclusion: This was a very special evening, with very special music in a very special club. Something different to all the metal and rock shows I usually attend.

After the show I went straight home to build up a new bed – seems like an unnessecary side-note? Well this was kind o hard to do alone and the night went off… so not much sleep again.

IKARISCHES ENSEMBLE homepage: http://www.ikarisches-ensemble.de

IKARISCHES ENSEMBLE song samples:

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Nécrologue à l’innocence
(2004)

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Ewige Wiederkunft
(2004)

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Gnomus
(2005)