Schöpfe und Sümpfe/en
After twelve years, another new studio album. Actually a double album. Actually more like two albums than one double album. It is complicated. You have to hear it.
Everyone knows Münchhausen's story: he and his horse get stuck in a swamp, and he pulls himself out by his own hair. A tall tale, nonsense, we would say. Yet we still tell people facing difficulties they must overcome alone that they need to pull themselves out of the swamp by their own hair. An interesting contradiction, which provided the first impulse for the album.
On another level — those who know Solche know there are several — it concerns the metaphor of being stuck. This image has an inside and an outside.
The inside, being stuck in one's own thoughts and in greater and smaller psychological peculiarities, is the subject of the first record, aptly called “Schöpfe”. Its track list reflects this: the title song Schöpfe, Anankasmus, Dyslexie, Egomanie, Prokrastination, Narzissmus, Agoraphobie, Graphomanie, Monophobie, Kleptomanie, Moria, Insomnia and Selektiver Mutismus. The songs themselves actually sound more relaxed than this may appear at first glance.
Being stuck on the outside is the subject of the other disc, fittingly called “Sümpfe” (“Swamps”). It concerns things in the real world that hold us, in which we sink and can no longer move forward; things that bind us to situations, places and people and will not let us go, although we would like to move on. Following the title song “Sümpfe” are Abbruch, Aufbruch, Veränderung, Projektsitzung, Idee, Politik, Bürokratie, Sold, Kampf, Streifschuss, Nacht and Zukunft. An assortment of greater and smaller uncertainties, naturally with no shortage of possible escapes.
Altogether, the twenty-six songs of “Von Schöpfen und Sümpfen” show that there is still more than conventional wisdom dreams of, and that complexity need not always be complex: sometimes it can also be a great deal of fun.
