“The duty of one’s own face”: Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt, singer and head of the legendary Ost-Band, about working with Bela B., Rammstein, the GDR, fan expectations and artistic friction
With “Born in the GDR” they wrote one of the “turning hits” and took Rammstein with them on tour as a support act in the 1990s. But Sandow prefers to be judged by her art rather than by superlatives. It is sometimes described as post- or avant-garde punk, sometimes sounds gothic-dark, sometimes ironic, is presented in the form of songs, radio plays or plays. In addition to the Einsturzenden Neubauten, the Cottbusser are still one of the most exciting and productive experimental bands in the country. The double album “Children of Crime” is now available for the 40th time. Why? Karsten Kriesel spoke to singer and lyricist Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt.
Free Press: Mr. Kohlschmidt, 40 years old at Sandow – is pride in what you have achieved fighting the thought of old age?
Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt: It’s more of a great contentment and serenity. You can’t really grasp the number, as if you’ve been married to this band your whole life, it’s part of your own consciousness.
Free Press: For the anniversary there is a best of with 17 tracks, “Children of Crime”, half of the songs are newly recorded. How did this decision come about?
Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt: That was simply of a legal nature. Much of our oeuvre was recorded on labels that were later bought up by larger labels, which were then in turn bought up by major labels. There the songs are in some databases. Getting these labels to issue licenses alone would have involved legal fees beyond our means. It’s an appalling state of affairs anyway. The only chance to get our heads out of the noose and make it our tunes again was to re-record them. That gave us the opportunity to let the double album live from a common sound quality. There are recordings of our tracks that we really like, but they screwed up at the time because of budget reasons because they were mixed badly. And some things can simply be presented better today than was technically possible at the time. So we turned the disadvantage into an advantage.
Free Press: Their music has influenced many and feeds itself from many elements. This was often called the “avant-garde”. Have you thought a lot about “how” you want Sandow to sound?
Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt: We never did that. We were founded in 1982 and in 1984 we had a repertoire of 100 of our own pieces. They are all unpresentable today because they are extremely infantile and youthful. But that shows how intensively we worked from the beginning, only to release our first album seven years later. And that’s where all of our teenage influences came through. It’s impossible to expect a 16-year-old to have found his artistic language, it took us a long time to do so. But that’s also part of the artistic process, which I claim was seriously persecuted. But it was never homogeneous, so there was also friction.
Free Press: Were there key points in this finding process?
Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt: The first album was very catchy and rocky. And repeating myself is forbidden. We’re not really socialized in a punk scene, but rather in the Cottbus scene of jazz and painting. Hence the normative demands to develop a self-sufficient artistic life for oneself, the almost pathetic obligation to one’s own face. From the beginning of the 1990s, from this wild, exuberant, intoxicated state, we became darker and, in the Nietzschean sense, deeper – but also more incompatible with the pop-dominated western market. He needs the catchy, three and a half minute format, ironic at best. That was hardly possible with us, we were in our mid-twenties and in a very pathetic literary phase. But it also had to be purified again. After three concept albums a break was needed and when we came back in 2007 there was a lot of ease. We have remained true to ourselves in trying to discover new things.
m want, musically as well as lyrically. In any case, it goes on and there is no reason to draw a line under it.