One of the most beautiful words on the new album “Plié” by three quarter blood is “goose bumps”, i.e. the even more bare Bavarian form of goose bumps freed from the last quill, the crispy highlight of every church festival. In Bavaria, this can also be transferred to the human epidermis, which tends to form stubble when exposed to the cold, but also to caresses, horror and embarrassment. Sebastian Horn is particularly receptive to this, explains his musical partner Gerd Baumann: “Wastl was born with goosebumps.”
So this subtle in the form of a lumberjack sings in his favorite song on the record, “Rossbluat und Schneider”: “The goose skin is schee, because it doesn’t come from the cold aloa.” In the song, a suicidal woman and a man realize this after they were unable to walk through the emergency exit from life alone and find each other with a noose around their neck and “bachratznnoss”. A terrible chill romance.
With hundreds of thousands of little hairs, he looks out for such extreme situations, stories and feelings as if he were using miniature antennas. There are images like the one from a television report about refugees on a rubber dinghy, of the mother who gives up herself and her child in desperate need. It appears briefly in the epic piece “Ast vom Baam” about everything human: “And moing de Wejt looks completely different again, she says, and slips out of the life jacket with her child.” The horror still gnaws at him when he sings about it, says Horn. Such a parental statement has nothing comforting here, but destroys all hope. The image of mother and child stands for the whole song, a reversal of the folk music classic “Drunt in der Grüne Au”: Mankind has sawed off the branch under its butt with a chainsaw and is falling and falling and falling: “Not the dead, but the The living go to hell,” warns Horn.
For Baumann, Emmanuel Macron’s “okay in itself” speech to the world community in the presence of Merkel, Trump and Putin in 2018 at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris was such a moment that triggered whole shockwaves of thoughts. How do you tell your kids why the fallen are heroes? He recently drove through Verdun, heard the story of the murderous front in World War II again and thought: it’s similar in the Ukraine.
This led to a “song of mourning for all the senseless carnage in the world”, the “Song of the Unknown Soldier”. In it Horn sings, in the sober manner of his idol Ludwig Hirsch, from the point of view of a fallen man: “It was me who shot, but it brought eam ned vui, lived five minutes longer, now he’ll never wake up.” This reminds him of his favorite war memorial, the one in Freising, which has a sentence by Gabriel Marcel on it: “Because the dead are silent, everything starts all over again.”
Division of tasks: Normally, Gerd Baumann (left) composes and Sebastian Horn writes the lyrics. But sometimes it is different.
(Photo: D. Gloebl)
The two have found each other in their penchant for morbid – “blood”, “night” and “black” are probably the most common words on the record – for philosophizing and silly. That was in 2005 while making music for the film “Who dies earlier is dead longer.” The film musician Gerd Baumann and the studied biologist and Banana Fish Bones-Singer Sebastian Horn then ten years ago for the provincial crime thriller “Sau Number Four” a “folklore-free folk music” and right away the combo three quarter blood created, which has grown into their largest band project with four studio albums, an orchestral work, the Nockherberg Singspiel and concerts such as high masses for a broad fan community.
No wonder that the “Heimat-Sound-Supergroup” (according to the BR) was repeatedly asked for good causes (“Mia san ned nua mia”), this year they were allowed to contribute the benefit hit for the “Sternstunden” fundraiser. There was only one problem. When the BR editor came to the concert to see if one of the existing songs could be used, it soon became clear: “No, none that you can expect people to see on TV … everything is much too dark”, says Bauman. So they rewrote the shadow-free but essentially melancholic “Sonne Song”.
That’s nice and honorable, but on their own album they’re more to themselves. “We’re used to not letting the mood get too good,” says Baumann. There are also bright pieces, but always with a trap door to the basement: A rousing love song like “Liedeslied” turns out to be a plea of all unfinished songs to their maker, to finally give them a heart and release them into the world. And in the fumble anthem “Ewige Wolke” (Eternal Cloud), a mobile phone longs to be groped by the user, which Baumann doesn’t necessarily have to understand on first hearing.
The band is now a close family
“Plie” is an advanced three-quarter blood album, without any simple hits like their “Deifidanz”. This is also due to the fact that the band, which was initially brought together depending on the occasion, is now a permanent family. The Munich film music professor Baumann knows what he has in Dominik Glöbl (trumpet), Flo Riedl (clarinet, Moog), Flurin Mück (drums), Luke Cyrus Goetze (guitar, lapsteel) and Benny Schäfer (double bass) for excellent musicians, he composes now specifically for their respective abilities – and according to his stylistically wide-ranging preferences: he loves bebop, for example, which runs in slow motion, he says. “Plié” comes from their ritual of standing in a circle heel to heel, point to point before concerts and bending their knees to each other, but musically everything goes far beyond a ballet exercise: expressive and jazz dance alternates with folk dance – Spinning, western polka with harbor waltz, gothic pacing with pogo.
Musically, this is an alternating shower for the feelings from agitated (“Henna Without Head”) to snowed in (“Im Schnee”). Sometimes all it takes is a bell ringing, like at the very beginning of the record in “Om (do schneibt’s)”. Horn was writing it when the doorbell rang. The Lenggrieser pastor stood there with a shellac record under his arm. He found it while cleaning up the sacristy, Horn is a musician, couldn’t he digitize it? This was the last ring of the six bells on March 31, 1942, before they were melted down for weapons production in World War II. Horn had just written a poem about the mighty above and the bleeding below: “The bells hang above, and the sacristan o falls below.” Coincidence? That’s the wonderful thing in life, if you’re open, everything comes to you, says the singer – and you immediately feel goose bumps.
Dreiviertelblut, “Plié” (Millaphon), release concert on Fri., Dec. 30, Munich, Alte Kongresshalle