About Me
Zeraphine - Be My Rain
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This IS A FAN PAGE!!!!
- by Stefan Brunner -
- how it all began -
Sven Friedrich (vocals) and Norman Selbig (guitars), together with Berlin producer Thommy Hein, laid the foundation stone for ZERAPHINE after their previous band Dreadful Shadows had broken up in 2000. The first ZERAPHINE CD Kalte Sonne, out in 2002, was recorded at Hein's studio. Kalte Sonne turned into a surprising debut: sung entirely in German, the album proved to be a highly intense aural experience, a journey through emotional lyrics and dark sounds which alternated between aggression and melancholia. Despite, or maybe because of the high standards that particularly the lyrical side of the album set for its listeners, Kalte Sonne was an immediate success, and the readers of Orkus magazine voted ZERAPHINE "Newcomer of the Year 2002".
- what belongs together grew together -
While ZERAPHINE were a well functioning construct, split into three different levels of involvement when their debut album was recorded, they have since grown into a band in the true sense of the word. Alongside Sven, Norman, and Thommy Hein, the musicians involved practically formed the outer layer of the productive structure. Numerous concerts later and with a lot of added experience under their belt, ZERAPHINE decided that they were so familiar with each other and accustomed to working together that not much stood in the way of a band "transformation", so the new album, TRAUMAWORLD, is the result of a collective work process. The creative centre still consists of Messrs. Friedrich and Selbig - however, Manuel Senger (guitars, backing vocals), Marcellus Puhlemann (drums) and Michael Nepp (bass) were given the opportunity to get involved at any given moment in the productive process that became TRAUMAWORLD and to influence, for example, the arrangements. As they had done during the Dreadful Shadows era, the band retreated to a farmhouse in the countryside surrounding Berlin, where the quintet ensconced themselves with only a few song fragments and set about working together on their new album. Thommy Hein, whom Sven Friedrich likes to refer to as "the man who holds everything together", joined them frequently. The experienced producer always has useful hints or suggestions for improvement up his sleeve and has become a factor that they cannot imagine their musical life without.
- a lingual changeover -
Naturally, the most obvious change since the debut album is the fact that German as the chosen language of ZERAPHINE's lyrical world has been replaced by English, as a quick glance at the track list reveals. This lingual changeover, however, is not really a sensation, although it would appear that the use of the German language in particular played a decisive part in the success of the group's debut. Sven Friedrich had already hinted after the finalization of Kalte Sonne that his mother tongue as a means of expression was an experiment and a challenge in one, but certainly not an integral part or indeed a precondition for the lyrical structure. Surprisingly, Friedrich initially wrote the first lines of new tracks like Light Your Stars in German - only to scrap the result. "It's difficult to express, but as far as I'm concerned, many of the songs simply have an English feel to them," the lyricist remarks. And so it came to be that only two out of a dozen new tracks are sung in German.
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