Crystal Fighters
Random Hotel, Landstrasse, 2011
Some bands operate in such a broad spectrum of music styles that people might initially get a very diverse picture of them. The first and lasting impression that Crystal Fighters made on us was with their super-clubby track „I Love London“. We could rather see them and us dancing and shaking down the streets (like the girl in the official music video) than coming together for an acoustic session. Also their other big hit Xtatic Truth provokes the feeling of Crystal Fighters being heavily dependent on electronics. After some deeper listening we were then hit by the fragility of the band’s newer song „At Home“ and thus the song seemed predestined for an offstage performance. Yet it was still striking to see with which intensity Sebastian Pringle and Gilbert Vierich transferred their complex studio version into a lo-fi gem.
- Camera
- Sarah Brugner
- Sound Recording
- Matthias Leihs
- Post production
- Sarah Brugner
- Photography
- Simon Brugner
- Matthias Hombauer
- Artist
- Crystal Fighters
Random Hotel, Landstrasse
It is a coming and going. People and places are exchangeable. It is anonym and random. This blurred scenery of any hotel room is an elemental state of being for musicians on tour. The romantic motive of the artist as a rambling person is no accident. Yet the raw and pure charm of an idealized restlessness of the artist is soon volatilized by professional obligations. When the spiritual homelessness – footloose and fancy-free – turns into a factual one – bound to engagements-, the routine of the rambling musician is not so glamorous. Not everyone can or wants to live the cliché of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in ever changing constellations in nightly hotel rooms. Again, the illusion of ongoing intensity easily wears out in the normal course of life. The other side of the coin is the idling between the kilometres to travel, the interviews to give, the shows to play. Apart from the joy of making music and playing live, people have their own strategy of how to settle a little and savour the everyday bliss. Be it the recording of a new song on a calm afternoon in your lonesome hotel room – so did Matthew from Phosphorescent when he stopped by in Austria with his Nick Cave-cover of Right Now I am A-Roaming – or the companionship by your beloved partner in all that travelling – as Micah P. Hinson was treasured by his wife Ashley – or just having fun with your band members in the bathroom – as Thao did with The Get Down Stay Down.