Diamantener Oberhof

Children always get a fascination for things that are described to them as bad, damaging or scary.

Parents try to raise them surrounded by positivity and things that are generally accepted as beautiful. Most of the famous children's storybooks were adapted to become pleasant to the optimistic imagination. The endings seems to be the most important part since a happy one concludes the story as being about joy and celebration of good. Yet, it seems that children are the people most attracted to poking a dead animal with a stick or turning the lights off at night to pretend they're ghosts when covering themselves with the bed sheets.

Danger and the unknown are thrilling elements of life which we are born with. Feed a child with beauty and their imagination will create the monsters under the bed. Francisco Goya's epigraph on his 43rd capricho reads "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels." Beauty and ugliness are only two sides of the same coin.

Diamantener Oberhof's self titled release is an assortment of peculiar nowadays folk tracks gathered at the boundary between analog and digital harmony. The instruments around the lines of accordion are fairly unrecognizable, thus giving the sound an obscure background amplified by the strong use of field recordings and spell like vocals.

I guess that some would classify this album as an experimental attempt to create something new out of old ashes, but it is clearly not. What it is, without the slightest doubt, is the expression of an authentic feeling of joy given by the exploration of the unknown hidden ''under the bed''.

This delicate album inclines to get close to unexplored nature through playful wizardry and innocent rituals which are to be followed fearlessly for imagination can't do no harm.

Tracklist:

A1. Die Tiefe Scheu
A2. Die Brut
A3. Liebstockel
A4. Nass
A5. Die Welt in Tortenguss
A5. Wiegenlied am Tottenbettchen
B1. Mude
B2. Schlafmohn
B3. Scheide
B4. Das zertretrene Schneckenhaus