Blumfeld

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Blumfeld
Singer Jochen Distelmeyer during a Blumfeld concert in 2007
Singer Jochen Distelmeyer during a Blumfeld concert in 2007
General information
origin Hamburg , Germany
Genre (s) Indie rock
founding 1990
resolution 2007
Website www.blumfeld.de
Founding members
Jochen Distelmeyer
André Rattay
Eike Bohlken (until 1996)
Last occupation
Vocals, guitar
Jochen Distelmeyer
Drums, vibraphone
André Rattay
bass
Lars Precht (from 2005)
Vredeber Albrecht (from 2003)
former members
bass
Peter Thiessen (1996-2002)
Keyboard, vibraphone, bass
Michael Mühlhaus (1998-2005)

Blumfeld is a German-speaking Hamburg rock band . She counted from 1990 until its dissolution in 2007 the most important representatives of style Hamburg School and is considered one of the most influential and successful bands of the German indie - scene .

history

Blumfeld was founded in the spring of 1990 by members of the disbanded bands "Der Schwarze Kanal" and "Bienenjäger". The band is after the main character of a short story by Franz Kafka named ( Blumfeld, an elderly bachelor ) .

In January 2007 Blumfeld announced that singer Jochen Distelmeyer had decided, in consultation with the other members, to break up the band. Before they split up, the band went on a farewell tour in April and May 2007. Her last concert took place on May 25, 2007 in her hometown Hamburg.

Jochen Distelmeyer announced the start of a solo career in July 2009, his solo debut Heavy was released on September 25, 2009.

For the 20th anniversary of the plate L'état et moi , Blumfeld went on tour in August / September 2014 with the original line-up.

As part of the Favorite Record Festival, Blumfeld performed with the original line-up and additionally with Tobias Levin on the second guitar and Daniel Florey on the keyboard and third guitar on December 16, 2017 in Düsseldorf. On February 15, 2018, the band announced that Jochen Distelmeyer was going on a "Love Riots Revue Tour" with Eike Bohlken, Andre Rattay and Tobias Levin as guest guitarist in 2018. It remains unclear whether the band will release new material again.

style

Their sound, which was originally strongly influenced by guitar feedback, changed to a more pop-oriented sound after the band was changed in the mid-1990s .

The most important feature are the nested German texts, some of which are performed by the singer Jochen Distelmeyer in spoken chanting, which use visual language to link their own emotional worlds with social criticism. Not least because of its elaborate texts, Blumfeld was seen for a long time as a model intellectual band, which only made simpler messages accessible to a wider audience with the last few publications.

Blumfeld's music is characterized by a deep engagement with the social environment. The texts often focus on the difficulties of couple relationships and people as part of a rigid consumer society. Fears, depression, insecurity, disorientation, on the other hand resistance and protest against society and again and again love as the central motif are important terms that are thematized and worked on in Distelmeyer's texts. The sometimes dark and melancholy coloring of her music leads the listener to suspect a pessimistic attitude.

It was never a question for Distelmeyer to write the band's expressive lyrics in a language other than German. However, Blumfeld has decidedly refused to take part in projects such as quotas for German-language music on the radio or the targeted strengthening of a “new German self-confidence” through German-language music.

After the dissolution, a number of appreciations appeared. In the Junge Welt , Christof Meueler placed Blumfeld in a row of the “large West German protest bands ” with clay stones and broken colors . Die Welt honors Blumfeld as "one of the most influential German pop bands of the past few years", who quickly became successful with "their edgy, energetic music and their headstrong and political lyrics", but also did not want to be "pigeonholed [...]". In the opinion of many critics, Distelmeyer "created works of art with titles such as" Gray Clouds "," Dictatorship of the Adapted "or" Illness as a Path "that go far beyond popular pop songs." Ingar Solty describes Blumfeld on Friday as the "left-wing intellectuals ." of rock music in Germany "and certifies Distelmeyer" an expressionistic-poetic language that will remain unmatched in pop culture in the long run ". Solty interprets the "shallower sounds" on the albums Old Nobody and Testament der Angst and the focus on a wider audience in such a way that Blumfeld took on "responsibility for public thinking" and "faced the dialogical pedagogy of organic intellectuals in the sense of Gramscis ". Bertrand Klimmek says in Jungle World that Blumfeld has an exceptional position because no other band would have been “taken seriously” if they “allowed themselves to play Schlager all at once”.

Discography

Cover of the album Verbotene Frucht (2006), colored copperplate engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (plate XIII, 1705) shows red plums .

Studio albums

year title Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements
(Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)
Remarks
DE DE AT AT CH CH
1992 I-machine - - -
First published: January 1992
1994 L'état et moi DE98 (3 weeks)
DE
- -
First published: August 1994
1999 Old Nobody DE17 (8 weeks)
DE
- -
First published: January 1999
2001 Testament of fear DE6 (5 weeks)
DE
AT20 (5 weeks)
AT
-
First published: May 2001
2003 Beyond everyone DE7 (6 weeks)
DE
AT18 (4 weeks)
AT
CH80 (1 week)
CH
First published: August 2003
2006 Prohibited fruits DE21 (3 weeks)
DE
AT43 (2 weeks)
AT
-
First published: April 2006

more publishments

  • 2002: The world is beautiful (re-release of the singles from 1991 and 1992)
  • 2007: One more song - The Anthology Archives Vol. 1 (5 CD box, re-release plus bonus material)
  • 2007: Naked as Naked / Live in Berlin. - Concert film, recorded at one of the farewell concerts in the Berlin Postbahnhof

Singles

year Title
album
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements
(Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes)
Remarks
DE DE AT AT CH CH
1999 A thousand tears deep
Old Nobody
DE93 (3 weeks)
DE
- -
First published: February 1999
2001 Gray clouds
testament of fear
DE59 (8 weeks)
DE
- -
First published: April 2001
2003 We Are Free
Beyond Anyone
DE59 (4 weeks)
DE
- -
First published: August 2003
2006 Tics
forbidden fruits
DE89 (2 weeks)
DE
- -
First published: April 2006

More singles

  • 1991: Ghetto world
  • 1992: slow motion
  • 1992: dream: 2
  • 1994: Outside on bail
  • 1995: amplifier
  • 1999: Status: Quo Vadis
  • 2001: The dictatorship of the conformist
  • 2001: waves of love
  • 2003: New morning

literature

  • Till Huber: Blumfeld and the Hamburg School. Secondary - intertextuality - discourse pop . V&R unipress, Göttingen 2016. ISBN 978-3-8471-0594-7 .

Web links

Commons : Blumfeld (band)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. (bir): A thousand tears bye. The Hamburg band Blumfeld said goodbye with two concerts . In: Hamburger Abendblatt . May 26, 2007 (accessed July 1, 2007)
  2. www.jochendistelmeyer.de ( Memento from June 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on June 1, 2011)
  3. Aurelia Kanetzky: Tour start Blumfeld: Setlist and videos from the Cologne Live Music Hall. Rolling Stone, August 28, 2014, accessed December 5, 2014 .
  4. Attendance at the Favorite Record Concert on December 16, 2017
  5. ^ Official website of Blumfeld (accessed February 15, 2018)
  6. Article in Rollingstone (accessed February 15, 2018)
  7. Blumfeld: No fooling around Germany. (No longer available online.) In: Musicline.de. Phononet GmbH, archived from the original on July 16, 2015 ; Retrieved June 22, 2014 .
  8. z. B. the following three appreciations:
    Edo Reents : gloss on the dissolution of Blumfeld. In: FAZ . January 25, 2007
    Joachim Frisch: Blumfeld dissolves and becomes a neuroelectric impulse . In: taz . January 31, 2007, p. 20
    Ingar Solty : Pasolini roll backwards. An obituary for Blumfeld. In: Socialism . 34th volume, issue 3/2007, p. 58f.
  9. Christof Meueler: Death of the day: Blumfeld . In: young world . January 24, 2007 (accessed April 12, 2007)
  10. Frank Schmiechen, Klaus-Peter Thiemann: A thousand tears deep. Blumfeld dissolves . In: The world . January 24, 2007 (accessed April 12, 2007)
  11. Ingar Solty: Against the comfort in the unculture. Blumfeld, the left-wing intellectuals of rock music in Germany, have disbanded. An obituary . In: Friday . 5/2007, February 2, 2007 (accessed April 12, 2007)
  12. Bertrand W. Klimmek: I-machine, Buffalo, Gnu. Blumfeld no longer exists ( memento from September 6, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ). In: Jungle World . 9/2007, February 28, 2007 (accessed April 12, 2007)
  13. a b Chart sources: DE AT CH