In Giraffe by Adventure Team

 

Over the last month I have really fallen for Adventure Team, a multi-national trio who are based in Berlin. The Monorail mailing list was responsible for my introduction to the band. This particular email was written by Lauren who also happens to be releasing Adventure Team's new album In Giraffe via her Heavenly Creatures record label.

Lauren's passion for this band and record leapt off my screen and into my heart. I checked out their 2018 album Anyone Can Draw and was immediately sucked in by the glorious guitar sounds spread beautifully throughout. Lauren has also snapped up The Cords (interview here), so I'm keeping a very close eye on Heavenly Creatures. It could be my new favourite record label!

Adventure Team are Jonathan, Ian and Juan and in the email Lauren wrote beautifully of the band driving 17-hours while listening to Teenage Fanclub, The Clean and Yo La Tengo. The trio were heading for a remote farmhouse north of Bordeaux, where they recorded In Giraffe in only 3-days. 

'There is one song that was written as a blatant Dinosaur Jr. rip-off ... Sucker from Outer Space ... as a reaction to getting constantly compared to them.' Jonathan

Guitar sounds crash, collide, jangle, blur and beautifully push the needle into red at times. The title comes from Marshall Rosenberg's theory that giraffes speak the language of the empathetic connection.

A friend turned me on to Marshall around the time I was writing the record. 

It's a plea for overcoming our differences with each other. Jonathan

Lets get back to the music!

Fuzzy, scuzzy guitars that can take off and soar, or just chime along in the background as if the band were recorded jamming and then came up with the vocals and melodies over the top.

Listen to the middle instrumental in Goodbye Zen Arcade head for the sun and then drop back down, or the intro to Quench (fantastic song title) that you'd happily let run on for 5-minutes. There's an urgency to Spinning, it sounds like vocals are traded and the guitars are just sublime.

Got off from a train

Same as yesterday

No-one said a word

My head gets spinning

Winegum is a real favourite of mine. There is another delicious intro that will make you pause and consider if electric guitars are capable of the coolest and most beautiful sounds of all time. Birds singing? Babies gurgling? Or Adventure Team jamming and sounding super glorious? I love that we go back a long, long time refrain.

Anyway, I was delighted to discover that Adventure Team were in a position to add two Scottish dates to their tour diary. So I got in touch to see if they would answer a few questions. Thanks to Jonathan for taking the time to answer.

Adventure Team play Bar BLOC, Glasgow on Thursday 13th June (free entry) and Leith Depot, Edinburgh on Friday 14th June.

Interview with Jonathan Stroemer from Adventure Team

EF - Who is in Adventure Team? How did you meet and form?

Adventure Team are Ian Tilling, Juan Carrizo and myself, Jonathan Stroemer. Ian, who plays drums in Adventure Team, is a musician, game programmer and astrophysicist originally from Shropshire. He also sings and plays guitar in his own fantastic band Grief Scene and he used to be in Trapped Mice, back when he was still living in Scotland and Leoprrrds during his early days in Berlin. 

Juan, our bass player, is a musician, videographer and DJ from Córdoba, Argentina. He used to play guitar in Les Leitmotif. Myself, I’m originally from a small village in the Sauerland, a rural area in the West of Germany. 

I started Adventure Team in 2015, as a vehicle for my songwriting. Around the late summer of that year, I met our first bass player Emile Cerf through a Craigslist ad, him and I shortly after recruited my old friend Malte Quiter on drums. We played our first show at The Sunday Matinee in November of that year. The Sunday Matinee is an inclusive, monthly DIY concert series friends of mine from bands like nunofyrbeeswax, Brabrabra, Apostrophe and Jetzt werd ich dumm had just started in Berlin around then. It’s actually still going, I joined them in organising the Matinee early in 2016. These days, besides a little bit of booking, I’m mostly doing sound on the actual days of the event. 

Before I moved to Berlin, I used to live in Hamburg for a few years, where besides failing to get together a band for my own stuff, I studied historical musicology. I still played lead guitar in a band with some friends of mine though and we played gigs around town. At the point I arrived in Berlin, I’d almost given up hope of ever finding people to play with— I remember thinking that perhaps being in a band was a thing of the past I as a late-born had missed out on. Thankfully, all that changed when my friend Bastian from the band I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, whom I’d just randomly met at Barry Burns’ Neukölln bar Das Gift, dragged me along to a Brabrabra gig, which was my first real touching point with the Berlin DIY music scene.

In the aftermath of our first gig at The Sunday Matinee, Emile, Malte and me started playing a lot of shows around Berlin and we went on a first short tour with nunofyrbeeswax around Northern Germany in 2016. We also played at a few small festivals. In 2017, we recorded our first album “Anyone Can Draw” with my friend Jaike Stambach. The album came out on cassette tape in early 2018 on Dutch indie label Geertruida. We continued to play around Berlin as much as we could, but Malte’s and Emile’s personal responsibilities made scheduling a real ordeal. In late 2019, Emile told us that he wanted to leave the band to focus on his illustration work. A few months passed without any leads for a successor and I was starting to feel pretty desparate, until one day in January 2020, out of the blue, Juan contacted the band account on social media. It turned out he’d seen us play with The Goon Sax and he was a fan of the band. Juan had just arrived in Berlin the previous year, via Copenhagen, which had been his first stop in Europe after having spent a year travelling and working around New Zealand. Him and I immediately bonded over our mutual fandom of Flying Nun Records (specifically Here Come The Cars by The Clean’s David Kilgour) and Television Personalities. About a month after we’d first met, we'd built up a live set again and we managed to book a few shows around Berlin for the spring of the same year. Of course, that’s when the pandemic started.

When live music finally came back in Berlin, quite a bit later than in the UK, it became apparent that Malte’s focus had shifted away from playing with the band. After a longer period of no communication whatsoever around the summer of 2022, fate had it that Ian was playing at The Sunday Matinee with his electronic solo project Hex Organ. As we were chatting, Ian signalled cautious interest in joining the band on drums, which was further propelled by the encouragement of his girlfriend Rachel. Apparently Anyone Can Draw had been on heavy rotation in their flat throughout the pandemic, so when we finally had a first practice together a few weeks later, he already had a pretty good grasp of some of the older material. Ian and I had already gotten to know each other at another Sunday Matinee a few years before, when he played with his band Leoprrrds. When we got re-acquainted with each other, it wasn’t long until we started identifying a lot of parallels in our respective upbringings—the rural environments we both grew up around, our first steps in the digital realm at the helm of the mighty Commodore Amiga 500, allergies we both share and of course a lot of musical overlap, the latter of which culminated in our simulaneous presence, unknowingly, at a bunch of Primavera Sound festivals in Barcelona in the late 2000s.

The songs on your new album sound very 'natural'. Do you take a lot of time on song structures and guitar sounds? Or does it all happen naturally through jams?

All of the songs on In Giraffe, with the exception of Spinning, had already been written by me before Ian completed the new line-up. So there wasn’t too much jamming going on for the most part. When I write a new song, I usually tend to write all the different instrumental parts at once. So when I come up with a melodic riff on the guitar, I usually already have a pretty defined idea of what the other instrumental parts are going to sound like. It’s just the way my brain works. 

Juan and I came up with Spinning during our first time we ever played together. It started out with this melody that Juan came up with on the bass, then we basically finished up the rest over the course of the next two hours and we recorded a demo of the song on a four-track tape machine in our practice room, with Juan scribbling his part of the makeshift lyrics onto an empty beer can. The finished song on the album doesn’t veer too far from this original version.

It does seem like we’re slowly gravitating towards writing more stuff together in recent times though, as the band is getting to know each other better. But I suppose that ’natural’ feeling might be what I’m listening for when I’m arranging a newly written song, like adding the right amount of salt while cooking, or finding the perfect composition for a photograph you’re taking. It does kind of feel like songs dictate their own form, but obviously that’s all informed by the music we’ve been listening to growing up, the music that shaped who we are. For me, all that started with The Beatles and Catholic hymns in church. It’s definitely true that I find myself strongly drawn to effective arrangements in songs—when I was in my early 20's, I got obsessed with the songwriting of Motown songwriters like Holland-Dozier-Holland and their chase of the perfect pop hit formula, which I used as an excuse to write my BA thesis about Motown and Stax. I love power pop like Big Star or The Flamin’ Groovies too. 

I guess I spend some time on getting the guitar sounds right the way that I'm hearing them in my head. Overall though, my general approach to all that hasn’t really changed very much in pretty much the last decade or so. I can basically make it work with whatever Fender-type guitar and a bunch of different gain pedals that I’m stacking in various parts of songs for different gain and volume levels. The quality of the result is more down to finding a combination of guitars, amps and pedals that match each other. My basic sound has been for years a Jazzmaster played through these two clones I built of the Crowther Audio Hotcake (a legendary, Flying Nun-related overdrive pedal from New Zealand) into a Vox AC30. I’d attribute the rest of the ’natural’ sound you’re perceiving to our recording engineer Jaike’s general, rather Albini-influenced approach. I guess he’s mostly just trying to capture the sound of the band in the room.

Speaking of the new album, I love the limited fanzine that comes with the Monorail edition. It sounds like you had quite a road trip en route to recording! Did your band mates turn you on to any songs you hadn't heard before?

The fanzine is all Lauren from our label Heavenly Creature Records' work. It’s been great to collaborate with her and to finally see what she would come up with. But yes, it’s been quite the road trip and one that all three of us thoroughly enjoyed undertaking! We pretty much listened to music non-stop on the way down there to France and back, just sort of picking music at random as certain bands and albums would come up while the three of us were chatting in the car. An album that really stuck with me since the trip was Nighthawks At The Diner by Tom Waits that Ian brought up. I knew the album from far far back, but it was Juan’s first time ever hearing any of Tom Waits’ stuff. Other than that, Juan introduced us to some Latin American indie, he’d specifically prepared a playlist for the trip. All three of us took a pretty deep dive into our musical biographies. I played the other two Daisies of the Galaxy by Eels at one point, a record that had a really formative influence on teenage me back in the early 2000s. And then there was stuff like Like Flies On Sherbet by Alex Chilton or Saturn Strip by Alan Vega.

As for the recording, how important was it to have a short and tight timeframe to get things done?

It definitely made for a very condensed experience. If you’re working against tight constraints like we were, you do get a different kind of determination in the back of your head to make every moment count. But I think I can speak for the whole band when I say that we went in pretty confident, since we knew we could a hundred percent trust Jaike. The rest was all on us. But that said, we also went into it with a mutual understanding that mistakes were bound to happen and we were actually welcoming the good kind of them. 

There of course were some hiccups too, but minor ones, that we managed to navigate pretty well, in my personal opinion. It’s a bit grandiose to pretend it was all part of the plan, since the way it happened was really due to considerations of scheduling and finances, since we’re all just regular people working jobs, with families, like myself, but there definitely is something about that whole Minutemen “We jam econo” kind of ethos when it comes to capturing the essence of what you’re doing artistically.

How was your album launch party? How does it feel to play your music live?

It was great, really. We had our friends Slipper join us for the occasion, one of my personal favourite bands in town and beyond. They write these great, timeless, folky songs with an almost pastoral feel. Two of them, Rachel and Sean, are actually Glasgow transplants. We were playing at this place in Friedrichshain called Loge, a relatively new venue in town, where we’d played before just once, the previous year. Ian has also played there twice already with Grief Scene. It’s this DIY kind of place that looks like an unassuming kind of bar from the street, but there's this great concert room in the catacombs underneath. Most importantly, people turned up and they enjoyed each of our sets, to the point where we were being asked to sign records by the end of the night. Other than that, it was just great to see a lot of familiar faces and chat away on the sidewalk outside the place.

And I love playing with Juan and Ian, both of them play with a lot of passion and at the same time, I know I can totally rely on them. They really make the songs come to life and I love how playing with the band, the songs start to develop a life of their own, independent of their humble beginnings of how I wrote them originally.

Will you make it over to Scotland to play a show or two?

As a matter of fact, yes, we are! We’ll play at Bloc in Glasgow on the 13th of June and in Edinburgh at Leith Depot on the following day, the 14th. Hope to see you there!

What are your plans with the band? Do you look ahead, or even get time to? Or just focus on enjoying the moment?

I guess we aren’t really looking so far ahead at this point, but the general plan is to play more shows, especially outside Berlin and abroad, and of course to keep making new music together. It’s a dream of Juan’s and mine to get to play in New Zealand sometime. But for starters, it would be great to just manage to book more shows outside Berlin in general. We’re keen.