Get Well Soon, the group fronted by German singer-songwriter Konstantin Gropper, has a new album on the way, the fantastically-named The Scarlet Beast O’ Seven Heads, set for release on September 3 via City Slang.
We last talked to Konstantin in 2010 about the release of his second album, Vexations, back when he was in full harbinger-of-the-apocalypse mode. He’s jettisoned some of the doom now and self-appointed the new LP as his “summer record”, one which takes stock of what he learned composing music from Wim Wenders’s 2008 film Palermo Shooting, and matches Gropper’s preference for the grandiose with a rafter of cinematic influences.
Get Well Soon are playing a set at the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen on September 12 in support of the new album, but ahead of that, we’ve got a UK exclusive premiere of the video for ‘Roland, I Feel You’ from the LP and a quick interview with Gropper by way of introduction:
This new album is your “summer record”, so what can we expect from the new album, sonically and lyrically?
Konstantin Gropper: I guess it is very self-referential. I would say that compared to the previous albums, it is the most colourful one. Also a bit less serious, I guess. Lyrically it’s still not quite the sunshine album. So I guess I’d file it somewhere in between an Italian holiday and the apocalypse.
You’ve said that this new LP is “definitely my movie-album”, and then presented us with one hell of a cinematic video for ‘Roland, I Feel You’. Having composed music for Wim Wenders, how has the cinema influenced the new album?
KG: Cinema has always influenced me and my music, but on this album it is, for sure, the main topic. There are quite a few film and soundtrack déjà vus for fans of the genre. But I guess more generally speaking, it is my aim to create images and moods. When I’m making music for an existing film I can support the images; when I’m making music for Get Well Soon, the music itself has to create the movie.
When I was doing my research for this album, I found inspirational gold with the soundtracks for Italian thrillers and horror movies from the seventies. That was kind of the starting point for this album. But there also a lot of other references: Wendy Carlos, Henry Mancini, Bernard Herman and, of course, my biggest hero, Morricone.
Could you perhaps give us a bit of an introduction to the ‘Roland, I Feel You’ video in terms of its background, story and imagery?
KG: This video visualises the whole album rather than just the one song. Much like the album, it’s sort of a collage with a lot of references, but never too obvious. Parts of it may remind you of Italian Westerns, Argento, Jodorowski, Czech fairy tales, Godzilla and so on, but I think and I hope that in the end it’s a whole new film of its own. Or in in this case: the trailer for a whole new film. That was the idea: to create a trailer. When you’ve seen it, you kind of have an idea of what the film’s going to be about, but you’re still not sure, what to expect. That’s why you can take it as a continuous plot, if you want, but you don’t need to and there are plenty of images that will throw you off track. Obviously it’s playing around with a lot of symbolism and mysticism, much like the album. I’d consider myself a rationalist without any true affinity to the supernatural, but I’ve always been intrigued by it on an artistic level. Conspiracy theorists and mystics will have a lot of fun with this video.
