Progressive Rock
SEK release their first album, “Wallensteins Garage”, on Friday 30 October through Exile On Mainstream Records. The trio is guitarist Paul-Willy Stoyan (Gavial, Jacke Schwarz), drummer Georg Edert (Elder, Gaffa Ghandi) and bassist Lucas Kazzer (Gaffa Ghandi, Borders Down), who came together in Berlin in 2022, during lockdown, out of improvising sessions that ran for hours.
There are five tracks — “Wallensteins Garage”, “Die Schlacht bei Lützen”, “Amore Mio”, “Auftritt zu Pappenheim” and “Amore Mios Ende” — and they start from an invented scene: Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–1634), one of the commanders of the Thirty Years’ War, shut in his garage. There he restores his stuffed warhorse, Amore Mio, while going back over the battles and the decisions he made. The cover is by Benjamin Butter of Gavial, who also plays keyboards on the record, and it shows exactly that: the man in armour standing in the doorway and the horse up on two planks.
“Die Schlacht bei Lützen” is a nine-minute instrumental about the 1632 battle in which the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus and Field Marshal Pappenheim, of Wallenstein’s side, were both killed. More than ten thousand soldiers fell, and Wallenstein withdrew towards Bohemia, leaving behind the wounded, the guns and most of the baggage train.
“Auftritt zu Pappenheim” came out of onstage improvisations during the 2024 German tour. Fabien de Menou recorded and mixed the album, adds keyboards to that track and is credited as producer alongside the band; Stefan Brueggemann mastered it at the Mastering Room in Berlin.
The launch show is on Saturday 10 October at Neue Zukunft in Berlin, part of a run of seven dates between 9 and 17 October taking in Chemnitz, Dresden, Jena, Zittau and Lübbenau. For one of the seven, not even the city has been announced.
Text by Guillem Cardós