The Jams kept piling up and the mixture of styles might have become even more out of control. But since there was still no sign of opportunity for even a single concert coming up, we didn´t know where to with all of this. When we were up to about 20 odd ideas, that were more or less finished, we put our foot down and said: “Alright, that´s it! 'JAM VERBOT' !”(No more jamming!). We got all the equipment necessary to record the next album mostly by ourselves. But as mentioned, the room wasn´t exactly giving us much space for a proper recording session. So Fred was helping us out once again.
Saving our asses once more, he let us record, as the first ones, in his new founded studio, Soundtown Studios in Karlsruhe-Blankenloch. One can not over state how much that guy lives and advocates rock´n`roll. So we packed all our equipment in Moe´s age old Volks` Caddy, boiled the amount of tracks down to 16 or 17 and left for Soundtown.
It was March by now but the wheater shitty as it had been all winter long. So we unloaded quickly and began to set up for a weekend of action. When Jonas, the one in charge of recording and mastering, arrived, he first asked Schnitzel where Jule was. We forgot to inform him about the change in constellation. Around midnight, everything was plugged and the sound was checked. The recording session could start. As we did with all the releases before, we went on doing it live. That first night we got down five or six songs. One of Fred´s friends who wanted to help us to set up our gear, was too late for our enthusiasm and instead made it his mission to circle between us serving us all kinds of refreshments on a silver plate. It went on till five or six in the morning.
When we rose the next day, with a head as big as Buckingham Palace, we didn´t take this as an excuse and recorded the next four songs within the first two hours of our day (which started admittedly fucking late).
“Gewürm”, “Cräcking Bonez”, “Dunkel” and “Sexy”, each didn´t take more than one to three takes. For the latter Shelly even borrowed her red hippy dress to Schnitzel, for him to get in the right mood to sing that particular song. The Feeling resembled pretty much the vibe we had in those overnight lockdown sessions.
Some ideas we had worked out by now, some were still rough and for the grater part improvisational. For example with “Balkan Vikings” we had just these cool riffs, but had no particular plan for the song. In the end we did this song in one take as a total improvisation.
We had completed almost every idea we had around 2 or 3 am and sat down on the couch wasted as shit. Completely busted we began fooling around on two acoustic guitars and a bit of percussion on with the last two pieces we hadn´t recorded yet. It was raining cats and dogs outside and we didn´t even realise that Jonas had began setting up two overheads, with some poor peoples engineering and a bag of tobacco to hold them in place. That way we recorded “Living on Speed” and “On the Road”.
We ended up with an album that reflected the long days of lockdown, winter, creeping around in the darkness and not know what was to come. It had differed a lot from the albums up till now, but it was an honest attempt to catch the hell we went through this last one and a half years.
For the cover we chose an artwork by another close friend and artist, Ramona Agata Borowiak. The picture showing two dead squirrels seemingly in a fight for live and death, one hanging from a rope and one laying down, had caused a lot of headlines and public outrage in southern Germany. The story was in news papers and discussed over radio broadcasts and the internet all over the place. “Art student kills animals for crude installation!”. When she was seen taking the pictures in the local park, the people thought she had killed those animals, which wasn´t true of course. This image holds more than just controversy for us, since one member of the local music scene, didn´t make it through this dark fall and winter period.
In the aftermath of these recordings we decided to separate ways with Iva, due to problems in communication.
“Bäd Vibez Önly – Aufarbeitung einer Krise” is a diverse piece of art that stands more than anything for the circumstances of the time in which we came up with the songs. It is drenched in drama, expectation, despite and a good drop of hope in a bucket full of steaming shit.
Through the lack of gigs we already mentioned in the beginning it wasn´t possible to create a physical release, but time will tell, maybe there will be a time for this too...