Cologne Tape – Welt 8: Track Premiere

Listen to Welt 8 by Cologne Tape featuring drums from Battles' John Stanier

Feature by Music Team | 16 Feb 2017

Cologne Tape is an on-and-off gathering of musicians from all over the world, incorporating the nucleus of the label Magazine and consisting of Michael Dippel (aka Ada), Barnt, Jens-Uwe Beyer, Jörg Burger, John Harten, Philipp Janzen, Mario Katz, John Stanier and Axel Willner, who you may well know as The Field. All members live scattered between Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg. They meet rarely and abruptly, but when they do each of them always has the feeling that something relevant needs to be done. 

Their first release, Render, marked the start of Cologne label Magazine in 2010 and now after several years of silence, their new record Welt is here. Eight musical arrangements (the last of which you can listen to in the player below), all of which answer to the same name and only differ numerically in their title. They were performed and recorded at the Dumbo Studios in Cologne, during which the nine Cologne Tape members gathered in a room with the goal of recording new material but no set path to get there.

Those unfiltered emotions were later refined with drums and synths by Stanier and Willner, and then arranged into a dramatic story arc under the direction of Jens-Uwe Beyer. Some of the Welt recordings feature friends of the collective such as Mexican artist Rebolledo, the guitarist Burkhard Mönnich and the singer Isis Lace, who all happened to be close by and joined the band spontaneously during their musical ritual.

Welt tells a story of deeply felt musical experiences – their music enables the listener to enter a world of sounds and rhythms, which all reflect in depth what Cologne Tape is as a band and a piece of art. Describing Track 8, Beyer told The Skinny: "Welt 8 is one of the main tracks of the album. Philipp Janzen (from Von Spar) and John Stanier (from Battles) are both playing drums, and the other members played all the instruments they could find in the studio – for me it's the hit on the record."


Welt is released on 31 Mar via Magazine