An Artists Blog: Artist Feature Black as Chalk

Artist Feature

Black as Chalk

BLACK AS CHALK "Ouro"

In my hometown there once was a record store. A jewel well hidden within a small street offside the pedestrian zone. Depending on ones perspective, it made the beginning or the end of the city. The bearded owner filled its ridiculously small 25 square meters with a complete collection of handmade music’s history. The electronic stuff he left over for the hipsters in the central shopping mall. The bearded owner called his dark cave "Pop-Shop", albeit his collection descended down to the deepest trenches of satanic death metal. There was no subdivision within genres whatsoever – every piece had been stoically sorted by the alphabet. One who was searching for the new studio album of the untiring Rolling Stones as a present for father’s birthday unintentionally came across The Ramones or The Rollins Band. The way to Miles Davis was crossed by Dark Funeral oder The Damned. The chainsmoking and coffee drinking owner never commented on the buying decisions of his customers. He preferred to influence them by constantly playing rustic insider tips, whose cumbrous charme and dusky blue atmosphere spoke to everyone having a heart for rockmusic offside the common radio formats.

If an album like "Ouro" would have existed at that time – the bearded owner had played it up and down all day. Even more, the four-piece from Göttingen would have motivated him to start one of these days, at which he not only played whole vinyl albums, but mixed different songs together using his second turntable. The immense variety of "Ouro" offers a lot of opportunities for that, though the album is deeply routed in different traditions of rock history while at the same time outstretching its branches in manifold directions. The beardman would have let the album fixed on the left turntable while mixing in newer and older classics from the right one. The craggy garage rocker "Snake Handler" would have started a pogo moshpit with The Stooges or MC 5 right in front of the club stage. Single notes and shreds of code would have risen up into the blue smoke over the turntables during the whispering and crawling of the spooky "The Commuter", joining the soundscapes of The Notwist. "Take My Place" would have shown the very early Placebo who’s the leader of the pack and inspired them to write "The Bitter End". Corresponding to the sparse acoustic ballad "Letting Go", Johnny Cash would have shown up between the shelfs. A very special favour Black As Chalk would have done to the enthusiastic DJ by delivering the tight lumps "In This Gloom" and "Helmet Off", because their sound offers every musical missionary the chance to present the secret masterpieces of Noiserock the curious customer, spanning from Dinosaur Jr. over My Bloody Valentine to the early works of Blackmail vorzustellen. If someone asks…

The bearded owner wasn’t a cheerful man. His voice grumbled, his eyes examined everyone with scepticism and his face showed marks of a life in which unicorns only exist to be shot by poachers. But did it happen that a customer pointed at a turntable and asked for the record, he smiled like a child. To the surprise of the customer he would not only have drawn "Ouro" from the shelf, but additionally three more albums which Black As Chalk had wrenched out of their souls, their instruments and the gritty, rainy alleys of their age-old hometown with its historic half-timbered houses. If Black As Chalk would have been on tour, he‘d also pushed some tickets over the counter; real tickets, printed on paper already yellowed from his smoke.

The bearded owner always had to fight with his store. Even in the mid-90s, as the sales of physical sound carriers reached its height and the beardman also sold CDs in his self-furnitured shelfs. He didn’t lived from the music, he lived for the music. The same is (for now) true for Black As Chalk, who sold a guitar in order to pay the recording of their third album and who now abolished the piano on their fourth effort. But this time the reduction was not due to the money, but rather serving the sound and aesthetics.

The motto goes:
Less is more.
Meager is more intense.
Smaller ist bigger.
The bearded owner of the old record store would have approved, murmuring.
(Oliver Uschmann)

Kurztext für Veranstalter etc.

Black As Chalk

Rustic and sensual. Sparse and spooky. Furious and lucid. Black As Chalk are wrenching a sound out of their souls, their instruments and the gritty, rainy alleys of their age-old hometown Göttingen; which combines the clashing impact of Noiserock with the atmospheric poetry of original Indie-aesthetics. Timeless melodies hide deep in the apparent chaos of the garage. Versatile compositions strike their roots into the depth of rock history while at the same time outstretching their branches in manifold directions of the best musical neighbours.

This is their latest release