Posted in Whathaveyou on May 30th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
The photo above was taken this past weekend at the Tonzonen Festival, which long-running German garage/psych/acid/more-psych rockers Vibravoid played as part of their ongoing 35th anniversary celebration. Headed off by the single “Neustart,” the band will also have a new album, Remove the Ties, out in September as part of the revelry, and you can see the clip for the fuzz-buzzy track below, and even if it’s not the most complex story you’ve ever seen in a video — flashing lights and a couple well-dressed, dancing young women — those who stick around are rewarded when the freakout hits later on. Just a heads up to give it a chance, is all I’m saying.
I hear a fair amount of space and krautrock in here, which is fair enough game for Vibravoid, but they’ve always been a band aesthetically rooted in the latter half of the 1960s, so I would expect at least some of that anachronism to show up on the new record as well. Look out for other live dates too, as they seem to have stuff booked already for December for the anniversary.
From social media:
VIBRAVOID – 1990-2025 – 35 YEARS OF MAXIMUM VOID VIBRATION
As children of the hippie era, VIBRAVOID belong to the only generation that, as teenagers in the 1980s, was able to save their parents’ Psychedelic-, Kraut Rock, Fuzz effects, and vinyl records from being thrown away. VIBRAVOID thus occupies a unique position within the German music scene.
Growing up in the tension between Ratinger Hof, Creamcheese and the Art Academy, founded in 1988 as Lightshow Society Düsseldorf and formed in 1990 as VIBRAVOID, the Düsseldorf band is Germany’s longest running active Neo-Psychedelic band, inventors of Neo-Kraut Rock, and an initiator of today’s vinyl boom. Vibravoid is a unique phenomenon. VIBRAVOID stands in the tradition of the first European psychedelic scene, which began in 1966 in the music metropolis of Düsseldorf and would change the world!
Like its predecessors of the first Kraut Rock wave, the VIBRAVOID sound was more popular abroad, with the band playing more often in London, Rome, Athens, and Helsinki than in Hamburg or Munich. The debut album “2001” was released in the first reprint for the Japanese market. Nevertheless, VIBRAVOID also set new impulses in their hometown; in 2000, the “2001” record release party at the Ratinger Hof was the first new rock concert there after 10 years of techno. In 2001 VIBRAVOID organized the first PSYCH FEST of the new millenium.
NEUSTART from the new album REMOVE THE TIES available SEPTEMBER 2025 from TONZOENEN Records.
Posted in Reviews on October 9th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
I have to stop and think about what day it is, so we must be at least ankle-deep in the Quarterly Review. After a couple days, it all starts to bleed together. Wednesday and Thursday just become Tenrecordsperday and every day is Tenrecordsperday. I got to relax for about an hour yesterday though, and that doesn’t always happen during a Quarterly Review week. I barely knew where to put myself. I took a shower, which was the right call.
As to whether I’ll have capacity for basic grooming and/or other food/water-type needs-meeting while busting out these reviews, it’s time to find out.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
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Vibravoid, We Cannot Awake
Of course, the 20-minute title-track head rock epic “We Cannot Awake” is going to be a focal point, but even as it veers into the far-out reaches of candy-colored space rock, Vibravoid‘s extended B-side still doesn’t encompass everything offered by the album that shares its name. Early cuts “Get to You” and “On Empty Streets” and “The End of the Game” seem to regard the world with cynicism that’s well enough earned on the world’s part, but if Vibravoid are a band out of time and should’ve been going in the 1960s, they’ve made a pretty decent run of it despite their somewhat anachronistic existence. “We Cannot Awake” is for sure an epic, and the five shorter tracks on side A are a reminder of the distinguished songwriting of Vibravoid more than 30 years on from their start, and as it’s a little less explicitly garage-rooted than their turn-of-the-century work, it further demonstrates just how much the band have brought to the form over time, with ‘form’ being relative there for a style that’s so molten. Some day this band will get their due. They were there ahead of the stoners, the vintage rockers, the neopsych freaks, and they’ll probably still be there after, acid-coating dystopia as, oh wait, they already are.
Taking influence from the earlier-Mastodon style of twist-and-gallop riffing, adding in vocal harmonies and their own progressive twists, West Virginia’s Horseburner declare themselves with their third album, Voice of Storms, establishing a sound based on immediacy and impact alike, but that gives the listener respite in the series of interludes begun by the building intro “Summer’s Bride” — there’s also the initially-acoustic-based “The Fawn,” which delivers the album’s title-line before basking in Alice in Chains-circa Jar of Flies vibes, and the dream-into-crunch of the penultimate “Silver Arrow,” which is how you kill Ganon — that have the effect of spacing out some of the more dizzying fare like “Hidden Bridges” and “Heaven’s Eye” or letting “Diana” and closer “Widow” each have some breathing room to as to not overwhelm the audience in the record’s later plunge. Because once they get going, as “The Gift” picks up from “Summer’s Bride” and sets them at speed, the trio dare you to keep pace if you can.
Some pressure on Dune-themed Montreal heavy rockers Sons of Arrakis as they follow-up their well-received 20222 debut, Volume I (review here) with the 10-track/33-minute Volume II. The metal-rooted riff rockers have tightened the songwriting and expanded the progressive reach and variety of the material, a song like “High Handed Enemy” drawing from an Elder-style shimmer and setting it to a pop-minded structure. Smooth in production and rife with melody, Volume II isn’t without its edge as shown early on by “Beyond the Screen of Illusion,” and after the thoughtful melodicism of “Metamorphosis,” the burst of energy in “Blood for Blood” prefaces the blowout in “Burn Into Blaze” before the outro “Caladan” closes on an atmospheric note. No want of dynamic or purpose whatsoever. I’ve seen less hype on the interwebs about Volume II than I did its predecessor, and that’s just one of the very many things to enjoy about it.
Classic heavy metal is fortunate to have the likes of Crypt Sermon flying its flag. The Philadelphia-based outfit continue on The Stygian Rose to stake their claim somewhere between NWOBHM and doom in terms of style — there are parts of the album that feel specifically Hellhound Records, the likes of “Down in the Hollow” is more modern, at least in its ending — but five years on from their second LP, 2019’s The Ruins of Fading Light (review here), the band come across with all the more of a grasp of their sound, so that when “Heavy is the Crown of Bone” lays out its riff, everybody knows what they’re going for is Candlemass circa ’86, but that becomes the basis from which they build out, and from thrash to ’80s-style keyboard dramaturge in “Scrying Orb” ahead of the sweeping 11-minute closing title-track, which is so endearingly full-on in its later roll that it’s hard to keep from headbanging as I type. Alas.
The kind of undulating riffy largesse Eyes of the Oak proffer on their second full-length, Neolithic Flint Dagger, puts them in line with Swedish countrymen like Domkraft and Cities of Mars, but the former are more noise rock and the latter aren’t a band anymore, so actually it’s a pretty decent niche to be in. The Sörmland four-piece use the room in their mix to veer between more straight-ahead vocal command and layered chants like those in the nine-minute “Offering to the Gods,” the chorus of which is quietly reprised in the 35-second closing title-track. Not to be understated is the work the immediate chug of “Cold Alchemy” and the marching nodder “Way Home” do in setting the tone for a nuanced sound, so that the pockets of sound that will come to be filled by another layer of vocals, or a guitar lead, or an effect or whatever it is are laid out and then the band proceeds to dance around that central point and find more and more room for flourish as they go. Bonus points for the soul in “The Burning of Rome,” but they honestly don’t need bonus points.
A kind of artful post-hardcore that’s outright combustible in “Concrete,” Mast Year‘s sound still has room to grow as they offer their first long-player in the 25-minute Point of View on respected Marylander imprint Grimoire Records, but part of that impression comes from how open the songs feel generally. That’s not to say the nine-minute “Figure of Speech” doesn’t have its crushing side to account for or that “Teignmouth Electron” before it isn’t gnashing in its later moments, but it’s the band’s willingness to go where the material is leading that seems to get them to places like the foreboding drone of “Love Note” and deconstructing intensity of “Erocide,” just as they’re able to lean between math metal and sludge, which is like the opposite of math, Mast Year cover a lot of ground in their extremes. The minor in creeper noisemaking — “Love Note,” closer “Timelessness” — shouldn’t be neglected for adding to the mood. Mast Year have plenty of ways to pummel, though, and an apparent interest in pushing their own limits.
In the span of about 20 minutes, Wizard Tattoo‘s Living Just for Dying EP, which finds project-founder Bram the Bard once again working mostly solo, save for guest vocals by Djinnifer on “The Wizard Who Loved Me” and Fausto Aurelias, who complements the extreme metal surge and charred-rock verse of “Tomorrow Dies” with a suitably guttural take; think Satyricon more than Mayhem, maybe some Darkthrone. Considering the four-tracker opens with the acoustic “Living Just for Dying” and caps with similar balladeering in “Sanity’s Eclipse,” the EP pretty efficiently conveys Wizard Tattoo‘s go-anywhereism and genre-line transgression at least in terms of the ethic of playing to different sounds and seeing how they rest alongside each other. To that end, detailed transitions between “The Wizard Who Loved Me” and “Tomorrow Dies,” between “Tomorrow Dies” and “Sanity’s Ecilpse,” etc., make for a carefully guided listening process, which feels short and complete and like a form that suits Bram the Bard well.
Virginian trio Üga Büga — guitarist/vocalist Calloway Jones, bassist/backing vocalist Niko Cvetanovich and drummer/backing vocalist Jimmy Czywczynski — don’t have to go far to find despondent sludgy grooves, but they range nonetheless as their debut full-length, Year of the Hog unfolds, “Skingrafter” marrying a crooning vocal in contrast to some of the surrounding rasp and burl to a build of crunching heavy riff. The album is bombastic as a defining feature — songs like “Change My Name” and “Rape of the Poor” come to mind — but there’s a perspective being cast in the material as well, a point of view to the lyrics, that comes through as clearly as the thrashy plunder of “Supreme Truth” later on, and I’m not sure what’s being said, but I am pretty sure “Mockingbird” knows it’s doing Phantom of the Opera, and that’s not nothing. They round out Year of the Hog with its eight-minute title-track, and finish with a duly metallic push, leaning into the aggressive aspects that have been malleably balanced all along.
Ultimately, The Moon is Flat‘s methodology on their third album, A Distant Point of Light, isn’t so radically different from how their second LP, All the Pretty Colors, worked in 2021, with longer-form jamming interspliced with structured craft, songs that may or may not open up to broader reaches, but that are definitively songs rather than open-ended or whittled-down jams (nothing against that approach either, mind you). The difference between the two is that A Distant Point of Light‘s six tracks and 52 minutes feel like they’ve learned much from the prior outing, so “Sound the Alarm” starts off bringing the two sides together before “Awestruck” departs into dream-QOTSA and progadelic vibery, and “I Saw Something” and its five-minute counterpart, closer “Where All Ends Meet” sandwich the 11-minutes each “Meanwhile” and “A Distant Point of Light,” The Moon is Flat digging in dynamically through mostly languid tempos and fluid, progressive builds of volume. But when they go, they go. Watch out for that title-track.
Chronicle II: Hypergenesis continues the thread that London instrumentalists began with their debut 2020’s Chronicle I: The Truthseseker and continued on the prequel EP, 2021’s Chronicle: Prologue, exploring heavy progressive conceptualism in evocative post-heavy pieces like opener “Daybreak,” which resolves in a riotous breakdown, or “The Archivist,” which is more angular when it wants to be but feels like a next-generation’s celebration of riffy chicanery in a way that I can only think of as encouraging for how seriously it seems not to take itself. The post-rocking side of what they do is well reinforced throughout — so is the crush — whether it’s “Dead Language” or “Into the Hazel Woods,” but there’s nothing on Chronicle II: Hypergenesis more consuming than the crescendo of the closing “Hypergenesis,” and the band very clearly know it; it’s a part so good even the band with no singer has to put some voice to it. That last groove is defining, but much of Chronicle II: Hypergenesis actively works against that sort of genre rigidity, and much to the album’s greater benefit.
Posted in Whathaveyou on July 1st, 2024 by JJ Koczan
German psychedelic/garage rockers Vibravoid mark their 35th anniversary as they invariably would: with a new album. We Cannot Awake will be released on Aug. 23 through Tonzonen, and it’s the latest in a flurry-rush of 2020s outings from the Düsseldorf trio, whose 2023 full-length, Edge of Tomorrow, can be streamed at the bottom of this post. There’s no audio from the new one yet, but preorders are up now and if you think they’re about to radically depart from the lysergic vehemence they’ve proffered for the last three and a half decades, cosmic and steeped in late-’60s traditionalism, well, I haven’t heard it yet, but that doesn’t strike me as particularly likely.
The band, via the PR wire, offer some perspective on their 35 years below, and you’ll find the release announcement for We Cannot Awake, including the e’er crucial preorder link, thereafter. Turn on, dig in:
Neo-Kraut/ Psychedelic Rock Outfit VIBRAVOID Announces New Album We Cannot Awake.
35 YEARS OF MAXIMUM VOID VIBRATION – About 35 years of Vibravoid.
“We were incredibly lucky that we were able to do all this as teenagers. It was this “teen anti-attitude” that no longer exists today. Kraut rock, fuzz effects, light shows, ’67 psychedelic rock and therefore real hippie culture were completely out or dead – so we thought it was “cool”. Here in Düsseldorf, kraut rock and psychedelic records, including record players, were lying around in the bulky waste, nobody wanted them anymore. That was underground. Even vinyl records were only really “cool” when nobody wanted them anymore – today it’s lame mainstream.”
Those were all unique moments back then and we were somehow always in tune with the times and were able to help shape them. Back then, we wanted to be pioneers of a new “beat and psychedelic movement”, just as a naive teenager would imagine. We really lived it all, for us there was no world after 1970… I really didn’t think it would be such a crazy trip back then. It’s all really crazy!”
New album We Cannot Awake is the perfect soundtrack for THC legalization and Vibravoid is the essence of Düsseldorf genetics. They create musical fever dreamscapes that are stronger than LSD. We Cannot Awake is the In A Gadda Da Vida of Generation X. Vibravoid haven’t released a real longtrack for several records, but now the band is making up for this and adding a few more hits.
With Get To You, Vibravoid deliver the psychedelic earworm for every large-space disco. Grooving pop music with hymnic hooks meets the effects wall of the 1960s. The ideal music for any highway.
The band’s love of The Byrds is obvious from tracks like Nothing Is Wrong or A Comment On The Current Times – but the combination with Düsseldorf’s “Motorik Sound” is a completely new level on which psychedelic music can work. The End Of The Game still shows Vibravoid as the German masters of the fuzz effect. Ultra psychedelic guitar sounds and echo effects create a maelstrom that pulls the listener into the spell of the complex rhythm. Vibravoid are not stingy with creative ideas, but still shake themselves out of their sleeves after 35!
Side A closes with On Empty Streets and paints a dystopian picture, yet Vibravoid manage to crank up the pop factor so high that the riffs almost burn themselves into your consciousness… expanding it. All the sound effects are perfectly embedded, you hardly notice that this is actually highly experimental music in the sense of the Düsseldorf school.
We Cannot Awake completely fills side B with over 20 minutes. Musically, the listener is in for a very special experience. Vibravoid fuse their Düsseldorf sound with the year 2024 at the highest level. We Cannot Awake is a journey into the abysses of human existence and other depths of the outer cosmos. Driving beats and interstellar frequencies channel the primal fear of the unknown, because this music is dangerous. Sonic carpets of strychnine and psylocibin. Magical mushrooms. Time is running out. We cannot awaken!
Posted in Reviews on December 27th, 2011 by JJ Koczan
German outfit Vibravoid are a hard band to keep up with. Since their 2001 debut was released on CD in 2000, they’ve gone on to become wildly prolific, working with labels like Nasoni, Sulatron, Fruits de Mer and Herzberg Verlag. In 2011, the Düsseldorf natives had their busiest year yet, with three 7” singles/splits, their second live album recorded at the Burg Herzberg festival (their 2010 set was also released last year), and the Minddrugs studio full-length on Sulatron (CD) and the Greek imprint Anazitisi Records (LP). Between that, their stake in the Timezine print fanzine and their affiliation with the ultra-retro Chenaski clothing line, the band has so much happening at any given moment that it’s hard not to get lost somewhere along the way. Even their lineup is nebulous. There’s no info included with the Minddrugs CD in that regard, except that the guitars, bass, mellotron, “stylophone” and theremin are played by Vibravoid, and depending on where you try to find the info, they’re either a trio or a four-piece, the only consistent member of which seems to be band founder/guitarist/vocalist Christian Koch. This can be frustrating if, say, you’re a stickler for including that kind of information in your reviews (cough cough), but ultimately, it stands in accord with Vibravoid’s propensity for mind-bending. Everything they do is steeped in a swirling, surreal psychedelia. What’s most surprising about Minddrugs is the varied forms that psychedelia takes.
Arguably, Vibravoid are best known for the kind of upbeat, late-’60s psych pop that hones in on the era before ballsy riffs took over in rock and it was more about the organ, the swirl, the echoes and the danceable feel. Even unto 2008’s The Politics of Ecstasy, that was the core of their style, and though those elements show up on Minddrugs as well, Koch and his fellow players are not at all limited by the confines of pop. In six tracks’ time, Vibravoid eases their way from the friendly garage fuzz of opener “Seefeel,” on which the vocals echo their verses and choruses bordering on indecipherability, to an epic closing rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” which comes in at nearly 23 minutes and boasts expansive sections of effects play, tripped-out singularities and, finally, cosmic triumph. In between the two extremes, cuts like “What You Want” and “You Keep on Falling” (the latter released as a 7” earlier this year) offer balanced space rock/pop, the 12 minutes of “What You Want” seeming to pass quickly through its undulating midsection jam for the strength of the hook surrounding, and shorter excursions “Do it Allright” and “Lost Intensity” offering deconstructed and surprisingly abrasive noise and subdued, well-executed sub-drone atmospherics, respectively. Minddrugs is every bit the journey its title and artwork suggest, but even as “Do it Allright” devolves into a long fadeout/in that immerses the listener in painful static and echoplex noise, one doesn’t get the sense they’re out of control or unaware of what they’re doing.
Posted in Buried Treasure on February 11th, 2011 by JJ Koczan
In my seemingly-unending quest to purchase things with Electric Wizard logos on them, I recently fired up the intertubes and made my way to the venerable All That is Heavy webstore to pick up a Black Masses t-shirt. While I was there, shopping cart open, I figured I’d grab a couple other goodies as well, which was probably the right move (it always is), since the shirt didn’t fit anyway. Depressingly, that’s probably not the shirt’s fault.
Anyway, here’s the rest of what I got in the order, alphabetically:
Brutus, Brutus Floodstain, Slave to the Self-Feeding Machine Saint Vitus, Hallow’s Victim/The Walking Dead Stoned Jesus, First Communion Vibravoid, Burg Herzberg Festival 2010 Wo Fat, The Gathering Dark
There’s a couple clunkers in there. Although its title serves as an appropriate summation of how I felt about myself after the Electric Wizard shirt didn’t fit, the Floodstain album was a more metal than I was looking for in that lunk-headed moshing kind of way. Stoned Jesus sounded so much like Sleep they should be paying them royalties, but they have a song called “Red Wine,” they’re from the Ukraine and — for crying out loud — they’re called STONED JESUS! Charm goes a long way in my book.
Brutus were the first new band I found out about on the forums, and though I’ll probably always think of them first for that, their self-titled album on Transubstans also rules. “Swedish Lady,” dude. Wo Fat I got while the getting was good, and I had the bootleg CD of Hallow’s Victim/The Walking Dead, but couldn’t resist SST‘s recently-issued official version. It’s Saint Vitus. Sometimes it’s okay to have doubles.
Occasionally Vibravoid‘s studio work — though I like it — tends to meander more than it means to and get lost in itself (and thus get lost on me), so I grabbed their Burg Herzberg Festival 2010 at import price thinking it might be a little more grounded, and it was. The decade-spanning German psychedelic acid rockers/clothing outfitters open with a cover of The Beatles‘ “Tomorrow Never Knows” and work in some Strawberry Alarm Clock as well, so even though it cost me more than the t-shirt, I still feel like I came out on top.
Some you win, some you lose, but overall not a bad get. Money’s been tight lately, so this and the arrival of another long-awaited package (next BT post) should do much to hold my buying impulse in check for the time being. Okay, probably not, but that’s what I’ll tell myself while I debate bidding on Clutch promos on eBay.
Brutus, Brutus
