plus49

Plus49:live - Seeing music
Someday in the mid 70ies, Brian Eno was grounded for hours at the Cologne Bonn Airport. Nerve wrecked by the uninventive background music emerging from the loudspeakers in the waiting lounge the idea for "Music for Airports" was born - the famous first Ambient work of the musician and future scientist.
Exactly at this location - the Cologne Bonn Airport - which got Eno so worked up, 30 years later emerged the first complete sound design for an airport. Starting from the "gong" to the on-hold tunes on the phones to the elevator music. All of it innovative, pleasing and modern, composed by two young cologne music producers by the name "plus49" (the area code for Germany). The "gong" is a hit. Over 100 million people heard the four-second-long sound with the sweet name "Happy Sky" since the summer of 2003. The Sound designs for the airport peaked in a plus49 album containing wonderfully light Pop songs with the title "All The Beautiful Things" which catapulted the band onto radio stations worldwide. Not your mainstream radio stations but those that play off-the-wall independent music for connoisseurs in Germany, France, USA and even China.
Plus49 has the right touch to help wonderful voices emerge, for creating bizarre videos clips which are beyond the obvious. Plus49 stay beneath any loudness. They prefer being creepers and being replaced by models on their album covers or being sketched as sailors in their suits on a fishing boat.
In 2008, plus49 will seriously stock up their line-up. A band consisting of permanent members accompanies the two on their tour that wants to explore all possibilities of a live performance. Planned are Club concerts as well as performances in cinemas and theatres. Main focus of the tour is their new album "Hymn Without Country". The title song is exactly about that situation: The song tells the story of someone who wakes up every morning in a different place with a different personality. In the evening he is so unhappy and discontent that he dreams himself into a parallel world. On their tour, plus49 will open up for one year a new door every night. No concert will be like the other, everything has the permission to happen.
Parallel worlds are also the main themes of the new plus49 album. For the first time, all voices are male but far from stereotyped macho attitudes. The tales about loss, getting older and feeling lost just had to be told and sung by the band itself. "Hymn without Country" is a very deep and moving album. This time, plus49 has put on all different types of colour coats on their songs which are throughout melancholic. Piano melodies light as a feather are central, surrounded by delayed guitars and soft synths which together have one aim - to pull the listener into the wall of sound.
Plus49 and Brian Eno not just have the perfect sound at the airport in common. They are both always searching for thier own system. A system in which music works by itself and does not have to orient itself towards trends or markets.