STATION 17 – Oui Bitte

Description

After a period of distance Station 17 just wanted to stand in a room together again and make some music, so they drove out of Hamburg to a remote site in the hills of the Hohe Geest in Schleswig-Holstein and played some new song sketches together – all day and late into the night. Afterwards they wanted to play the results live at a concert in Fabrik, a venue in Hamburg. No one in the band expected that the sessions would result in an entire album, but the music told them once again: what had been created here in the radiance of the moment could not be reproduced. A moment of happiness for the band collective. “Oui Bitte”, Station 17’s 11th album had been born – quite unexpectedly, between pool and trout pond.
It shows again and par excellence that Station 17’s is a pleasure to listen to. Why is that? You can either follow the intuitive reference play, the traces of genres (so to speak: listening with knowledge), or you can be geared to the dense interplay between driving, elegiac rhythms and a flowing, aesthetic stream of consciousness, either lying down or dancing with a liberated mind and body. Everything seems possible in the boundlessness of their music. The seven songs are irrigating these candid invitations into a flowing aesthetical stream bundling them into a pleasure which lets you forget your own disposition.
“Oui Bitte” shows Station 17 as a band of experts in a kind of acoustic transcendence. Their music tenderly forces you to engage in all of this at the same time. Already in the field recordings of the Elbe
shore with which “20.000 Meilen unter dem Mond” begins you are being offered a pact: Hand over all control to the music, swim out to the open sea and be thrown back to yourself – just so you can indulge in the sonic waves.
That prelude seems programmatic: In the following 40 minutes you are being carried along, you are being amused, catapulted, earthed, moved. “Oui Bitte” manages to douse the resonance body, to drift away, to wash ashore, to take off. The landing: always soft! The biggest continuity is the positive vibe, a reliable air host, pleasant, more shell than irritation. Station 17 do not produce cracks in the dam, they are smoothing out riverbeds.
“Bewegung” then appears as the highlight of the album, a manifestation of the idea Station 17. Move your mind and move your body, as Birgit Hohnen says here, a deceased companion of the group who is being projected into the present of the song through a sample. With your eyes closed this track allows you to take off meditatively. And then there’s the latent melancholy which finds its way in. This futuristic music of the past stays warm, stays cordial, stays inviting: to the sonic utopia of a more beautiful world which has already been established by this album at this point and by this band in any case.
In the end the record takes its time, a wide room is designed, meters are being covered. In the calmness of the last song a contradiction pops up: “Das Rasen” (“The rushing”). But the contradiction dissolves: If you listen closely, you are gliding through the high grass (“Rasen”) on which to lie down and listen to “Oui Bitte” invites. Yes, please: Repeat!