Notwist articles

I found Notwist singer and guitarist Markus Archer sitting near the bar before his band went on April 11 at the Knitting Factory in New York City.
I spent 30 minutes drilling the poor bastard with questions.
The first question you have to ask him is how Notwist got from there to here? There being the hardcore and metal band who played with Fugazi and Bad Religion. Here being the hodgepodge of electronic indiepop that’s earned them international props.
“It’s the records we were listening to at the time. Stereolab and Chicago stuff like Tortoise,” Archer said.
With Shrink, Notwist pulled off an impossible trick. They took a deliberate and ambitious attempt at reinventing themselves... and succeeded. Instead of coming up with a forced hybrid, they came out with what may have been the best album no one’s ever heard.
Shrink was ahead of its time. It is a genre bending experimentation that somehow comes out sounding perfectly natural. You must listen to understand.
But the album has been impossible to find. Zero Hour, the only label with sense enough to drop it on the U.S. indie crowd, went belly up.
“For Shrink we decided to just do something like a new start or try lots of different stuff. Jazz, saxophone solos, electronic songs, all these new sounds. We had already done all we could do with distorted guitars and we just wanted to try something totally different. We felt like we had nothing to lose,” Acher said.
They had a lot to gain. By adding Martin Gretschman (aka Console) into the mix, Notwist hit their stride by combining electronic beats and breathing textures with breezy, melodic indie rock and the ambiguous, detached calm that Acher’s voice brings.
Acher’s vocal style is also much better suited to what they’re doing now. The guy can really sing. In earlier releases, Notwist sometimes buried their best weapon beneath crunch and noise.
Now that Console is blowing up in his own right, Gretschman has instigated a gradual break up. Notwist has tapped Arne Van Petegem (aka Styrofoam) to man the powerbook. The transition was seamless, and the beats keep breathing.
Styrofoam opened up the Knitting Factory show. Van Petegem is interesting on his own, but with the Notwist, the whole is just so much bigger.
The current tour is to support Domino’s Feb. 25 U.S. release of Neon Golden.
Before this, Notwist hadn’t toured the U.S. since 1997. They didn’t even tour for Shrink. “We wanted to play, but we had no label support,” Archer said.
Thanks to City Slang support in Europe, Neon Golden is giving Notwist more exposure than they’ve ever enjoyed.
“We were surprised people were so much into it. In Germany people don’t react that way, they’re very nice but they don’t shout so much,” Archer said.
And big ups to the indie kids.
“I didn’t think there were so many people here that knew our records. These indie people, you know.”
In some European countries, Neon Golden is regarded as a typical electronic pop album.
“Here I guess it’s considered more underground.”