Eine Frage, eine Antwort. In der neuen Rubrik Sonntagsfrage stellen sich aktuell relevante Acts jeweils einer ausführlichen Fragestellung. Los geht’s mit Lapwings, die beantworten, inwiefern sie mit ihren Instrumenten die wütende Stimmung im Song „La ligne d’en bas“ kreiert haben.

„La ligne d’en bas“ is an angry song. How did you manage to create this atmosphere with the different instruments?

Natasha: I think we created the angry atmosphere through a combination of a few elements, the military-inspired drum patterns as well as the slightly distorted and very rhythmic guitar parts, and also the cello which had a slight distortion effect added as well. The combination of the hyper-rhythmic drums/bass/guitars and the relatively static melody lines from the vocals as well as in the cello interludes creates the tension in the first part of the song, and then when the cello goes up during the solo at the end the tension is magnified by the sheer distance between the bass (as well as the drums, who have their own low/high tension with the cymbals and low bass and toms) and the high cello. When Gilles‘ vocals come back in at the end, he is also in his upper range and nearly screaming, adding to that low vs. high tension and the rhythmic vs static, which could be also seen as the angry urge to make a radical change while simultaneously feeling powerless against the machinery of current politics. But that’s just my interpretation 😉

Ihr seht, da kennt sich jemand mit Musik aus! Natasha spielt in der Berliner Band das Cello und ist eine ausgebildete Musikerin, während Sänger Gilles eher so der Autodidakt ist. Er fügt aber auch hinzu:

Gilles: On my side, I could add as well that on the second part of the second verse (“Et toi, tu crois cette blonde aux crocs acérés, fille de l’autre arriéré….“), we also added some tension by changing the chords twice as quickly as in the previous part, which gives the feeling of speeding up the song and bring the listener into a more dramatic spiral.