London, East End
March 2007
re: Reise Reise (Travel Travel) by Soup de Nuell
Dear Friends,
Marco Polo is believed to have travelled about 14,000 miles during his lifetime; Ibn Battuta, the great Arab explorer of the middle ages, managed about 75,000. But both were dwarfed by the magnificent achievement of the Englishman James Holman, a retired naval officer, who travelled roughly 250,000 miles in the first half of the 19th century – before the arrival of trains and planes. He trekked deep into Siberia, sailed to Brazil, rode through southern Africa, explored unmapped parts of Australia and survived the bandit-infested Balkans. The remarkable thing about all this is that Holman was blind since the age of twenty-four – he made all his travels without seeing where he was going, he cautiously heard, smelled and felt his way through the world. 'While vision gulps, tactility sips,' his biographer Jason Roberts writes, 'an object yields up its qualities not all at once, at the speed of light, but successively over time, and in sequence of necessity. It is not a flash but a process, like the procession from rough sketch to finished portrait.'
Soup de Nuell ask us to come on a similar journey, from rough sketch to unfinished song. They are travelling between the 1960s and the 2010s, between song and track, the acoustic and the electronic, here and there, Oakland and the Orient, Hamburg and Berlin, London and Vienna, Jungs and Maedels. They feel themselves forward; they never gulp, but carefully sip. They syncopate between beats, they talk between words and listen between notes. It is easy to understand why they like the waltz: like no other rhythm, it turns time into space, opens it up for careful exploration. Moving, turning, stopping – you see: They are never interested in getting anywhere fast, unless it is Tábor. Sometimes they seem to loose themselves, and each other: the guitar is wandering off in one direction, the organ in another, the bass treads on the spot. But that is part of the game: you have to wait until things come together, even if it is only in the echo chamber. In-between: a melody that should not be trusted. What Soup de Nuell strive for is this in-between, the space that opens between what was and what may be, the coming and the going, the meeting point of musical possibilities. Come hither and find them searching!
Yours,
The Happy Armchair Traveller
To download all eleven songs and the cover of Reise Reise, please visit the Jungs & Mädels website at rock.test.at .
