Marbert Rocel

Centaurs, the last inhabitants of Atlantis, pearl divers of the sky, ligers, hybrids of birds, dolphins and walnuts, triplets of chocolate or flying tambourines? Yes, you'll find all of that in Marbert Rocel! »What doesn't fit into a single sentence won't appear in our music." It all started with the broken TV in Malik's and Panthera's flat. Extreme boredom was taking over so the two began training dogs in deceptively real imitations of bass drums and Fender Rhodes. But as the dogs weren't that committed to sticking around for the arrangement of the tracks, they got the boot and Marbert Rocel focussed on MPC and computer instead. With all their remaining dog food they moved into a studio that the nightingale Spunk had chosen for her nesting site. »We built a beautiful golden cage next to a microphone, furnished it with silk and brocade, locked it carefully with a paint brush and released our first album 'Speed Emotions' on Compost Records in 2007.« - A flash of lightning! Over the course of the last 525,601 minutes Malik and Panthera took turns in counting backwards while Spunk lived in disguise with a bird family next to the sports ground. They found glowing mountains of remixes from Solomun over Trus’Me to Douglas Greed, smilingly recorded lots of beats and painted their soundscapes at guest performances from Amsterdam to Olganitz, from the Fusion to the SonneMondSterne festivals. Swept off their feet by having created typhoons on stage with nothing but vocals, rhodes, brass, MPC and synth the trio set about a new album. They loaded their giant turtle (acquired as a bargain after the Copernicus disaster) with musicians, fruit and a box of instant emotion, to ride up to Holger on the mountain. While he prepared the finest German food for the band they found the recipe for their album: keys (white and black ones in the ratio of 2 to 11 divided by f), a lovely distant voice, the twitter of gryphons (temperature depending the tunes needed to be adjusted by 19 to 21 per cent), purring basslines, transformer drums, milk, a wood-fired oven, brass angled by 3 degrees east and a bit of lunar dust. All of this was jammed into a big box with a window and Marbert Rocel started the work on 'Catch A Bird'. »We listen to rap, love jazz and like it best to dance to house. Spunk also enjoys changing tyres on monster trucks. There is no well defined style – we're just making music in major with chords in minor.« Exhilarating, but always with a stroke of bittersweet pain.