Karl Ritter Solo and Weisse Waende

Karl Ritter strikes his guitar because he wants to hear everything that lives in its belly. No, he wants to possess it. He wants to own both the beautiful and the ugly tones, dismantle them, rebuild them. He starts with the blues, experiments with slide guitar, lets foreign, external sounds infiltrate familiar ones, mixing light and shadow, presenting musics that orbit the blues like moons, showing shadow, showing light, showing the strength and weakness of his guitar. “Dobromann” is a guitar-powered package, tightly wrapped on the foundation of the blues. This package can even be converted into an airship — when Ritter plays guitar from a bird’s-eye view.

The emphasis is on “free” – since everything is invented anyway. At least if it’s enjoyable, worth seeing, or otherwise a creative and intellectual delight. Reality is, as we know and are reminded daily in the newspapers, vastly overrated. Ugh.
We have a right to imagination, invention, creative impulse. We don’t need to hear more about production conditions, the suffering of young songwriters, or the endless crisis of the record industry. Those are relics of the last millennium: years of rehearsals in stuffy basements, days of isolation in overpriced studios, endless idling onstage, repeating songs until nauseated boredom, without variation. Boring – for musicians and listeners alike.
WEISSE WAENDE spare us this misery. They improvise – live and on record – inventing their songs anew every time, musically and lyrically, but never chaotically or without structure. Imaginative people don’t need that.
Their new CD is called "Frei erfunden" – “freely invented” – but you can call it "Everywhere Frogs", like I do. It begins everywhere and ends nowhere – and the computer claims my favorite track is called "Raid Frogs", which already says a lot about the music.
I won’t tell you about instrumentalist Karl Ritter and spoken-word vocalist Christian Reiner – you can look them up yourself, that’s what computers are for! The real mystery and multidimensional event is the drummer, one Mr. Pirker – apparently the “Dr. Mabuse” of this formation (that’s also how he appears on the record).
But Pirker could be anyone – the man who’d rather be an astronaut, the forester serenading a little girl to join him for breakfast, even the sheep traveling with a nun, or maybe even “Bernd”. Pirker is the man of a thousand faces, constantly surprising the rest of WEISSE WAENDE: Will he show up today? In what form? What will he play? And why?
He’s a mystery. And so, the band is left with no choice but to improvise. The songs happen as if by themselves – those earworms falling from the sky, the hits from a parallel universe, the true pop songs … and suddenly Pirker does what he must, and everyone says: “Well, that’s the end of the songs again!” And they’re right – because free invention allows far more possibilities (including properly honoring the mystery of Pirker).
WEISSE WAENDE's recordings should be sent into space aboard the next capsule leaving our solar system – as a golden record with a picture of Donald Duck, or shadow puppets and a waxed mustache. So the aliens can finally forget the absurd Waldheim soundtrack we sent last time – then peace shall reign between the stars.
And maybe, as a reward, they’ll send us their own Pirker … who knows?
WEISSE WAENDE. "Frei erfunden". Also available as a ringtone.
God be with you!
Father Michael Hass

Program and cast

Karl Ritter: guitars
Christian Reiner: voice
Herbert Pirker: drums