Formed in 2016, the German doomdrone trio Zeug consists of bassist Vladislav Overchuk, guitarist Benjamin Nash, and drummer Lorenzo Barbieri.
They create soundscapes that act as firm ground upon which to explore human emotion and vulnerability. You can think of their music as the play and your response to it as the actors who follow the script, read lines, and find their light.
Zeug have a new EP which they will drop on November 29 through Blood Blast Distribution. The album is called Grounded and consists of three improvised tracks. Because the tracks would be recorded live in a single take, it was important for zeug to find a recording space that fit their specific requirements.
This would call for the album to be recorded in a most unusual space. After some research, the band determined that they would record in an ancient water reservoir, built in the middle of 19th century in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg – Wasserspeicher.
The band later discovered that the location served some strategic roles for German Reich during WWII, and so, the act of recording there became an exercise of re-appropriation and a cleansing of the evil that the place still harbored.
As part of their work in the reservoir, zeug filmed a video for their song “Duende.” The video essentially became a short film which the band described the significance of below:
“For the central song of the EP—’Duende’—the band invited two performers (Sandra Bourdonnec and Phoenix Chase-Meares) and two camera operators (Fritz Tsai and Dhanesh Jayaselan) to produce an improvised audiovisual art piece, with Barak Shem-Tov as sound producer.
Each participant was given almost limitless freedom of expression, with the band acting as musical mediators, creating the sonic foundations for the performers. Therefore, what started as just the next EP of zeug, merged into a complex synthetic piece of art.”
New Noise now have the distinction of premiering the film made for zeug ‘s “Duende” below:
zeug – Duende from zeug on Vimeo.
Photo by Alexandra Bejster
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