Fenster

Room Fenster

The Room, Fenster's fourth album and their first release on Altin Village & Mine, marks the beginning of a new chapter for the band. After releasing three albums, a feature length film, and touring extensively throughout Europe and North America since 2012, The Room serves as an entry point into their sonic evolution. The essential characteristic of the band is transformation - within and between genres, albums, and songs. Their sound is a window framing psychedelic, groovy, hypnogogic, playful pop. Fenster is Elias Hock, Jonathan Jarzyna, Lucas UFO, and JJ Weihl. Their mission in creating this album was to compose and arrange every song together in a room. It is an experiment in collective creativity that pushed all of them to transcend their individuality and create something together which is greater than the sum of it's parts. The songs were tracked live in a house where the band ate, slept, and played together. They were intent on finding and locking into a human groove, one open to imperfection, while still maintaining tightness among them. They wanted to make the songs feel alive, as if the listener were present in the room with them. The album's title track "The Room" opens the record like a rollercoaster ride. There is a tension in the first bars that ties us to earth, a minimal riff that guides us to the first chorus where we feel we are slowly lifting into the air. By the time we reach the second chorus, it has exploded into a space far away from the planet's gravitational pull. The band's use of juxtaposition is not just a way of channeling a vast library of musical genres and concepts, but also a means of expression. Combining tender pop melodies with kraut-beats, disco grooves and psychedelia frees the band from any one sound and creates a genre all it's own. This playfulness is especially vibrant in songs like "Rhythm A" and "Haha Lol", which deconstruct and fuse together disparate moments of explosive rock, tender harmonies, percussion made of splashing water, voices from a radio, and electric piano. Thus, the whole process of making a record is about capturing a moment in time. This is the record they made at this point in time, all together, in a room.