Everything is just transition
From Sounds in Suspended – New solo album by Max Rieger
Max Rieger actually didn’t plan a new record. photo
© Gerald Matzka/dpa
Max Rieger actually didn’t want to release a new record with his solo project All This Violence. But then suddenly it happened quickly. The singer broke new ground for “Everything is just a transition”.
Festival season, a recently completed tour with his band Die Nerve – and now a new solo album. This year, Berlin-based producer Max Rieger had a lot on his plate. Nevertheless, the 30-year-old feels very relaxed, as he tells the German Press Agency. “Surprisingly, I’ve found it very unstressful so far. I don’t have the feeling that it’s going to be particularly stressful either.”
On Friday (November 10th) the musician will release his fourth album “Alles ist nur” with his solo project All This Violence Transition”. The record with a total of ten songs “just came about by itself,” says Rieger, who produces music for artists such as Drangsal (“Zores”) and Casper (“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”).
In contrast to his previous album “Others”, which he worked on for around four years, this time the songs were created within two months. And that even though he hadn’t actually planned a new record after “Others”. “After my last album I had the feeling: I no longer need this chaos and ‘otherworldliness’ that concerts and making music bring with them and I don’t want it in my life anymore,” says Rieger, who has a studio in Berlin . After a festival appearance in 2021, a kind of dam broke. “All the songs were dropped at once. There was hardly any scrap material.”
Consciously allow blank spaces
“Everything is just transition” not only describes the mood of the album, but also a kind of mantra for Rieger. It’s about understanding the journey as the real thing when producing – a learning that he took with him from “Others”. He couldn’t enjoy the creation process there. “It was always just about finishing the album.”
This time it was much easier to allow for gaps in the songwriting and sounds. He wasn’t so hard on himself. “I just found it interesting not to draw things sharply, but to leave them a little unclear,” says Rieger. The songs therefore sound a bit cloudier and more open, and are often melancholic. The synthesizer is sometimes accompanied by hard and washed-out guitar sounds, and sometimes soft melodies, for example in the track “becoming dust”.
The musician draws a transition between hard and soft in the song “21 Gramm”. It’s about the state of the soul, which can weigh 21 grams or even 100,000 tons. Is not that a contradiction? “It’s definitely a piece of contradictions, but in my opinion they don’t contradict each other. I also think that this is reflected musically because the song is very soft and very hard at the same time,” says the artist. In the end it’s about enduring the contradiction.
In general, he thinks that the album may not have to leave this state of suspension. And anyway, the title “Everything is just a transition” can be translated to the whole of life, emphasizes Rieger. “If you repeat this mantra over and over again, you will learn to appreciate the things along the way and the path itself.”