Bohren & der Club of Gore

Dark jazz, doom jazz, and ambient jazz noir are just three of the (sub)genre terms regularly used to describe the music of Germany's Bohren & Der Club of Gore. After emerging from hardcore punk and metal bands during the late 1980s, these musicians sought and discovered a new direction that reveled in sheer unhurried lethargy, a music persistently sedate, modally performed, and harmonically minimal. Their primary influences included film noir soundtracks, the bleak sonic landscapes of Lustmord , the scores of Angelo Badalamenti , the languid sax and soul ballads of Ben Webster , and the bleak, perverse, violent imagery of in the novels of Big Jim Thompson. Their first two albums consisted of guitar-driven imaginary midnight soundtrack-esque compositions including 1995's monolithic, two-hour Midnight Radio. Saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Christoph Clöser arrived in 1998 to replace founding guitarist Reiner Henseleit birthing their second stage with 2000's globally acclaimed Sunset Mission. With a plodding, syrupy slowness, Bohren & Der Club of Gore sought a beguiling, beautiful yet ominous stasis in their music. Their tunes seemed to begin already in the middle and end the same way. Later recordings, such as 2008's Dolores, employed Clöser's vibraphone and Fender Rhodes as primary instruments, slightly easing the late-night dread, in bringing this second phase to a close. The new one began in earnest with 2011's Beileid. Mike Patton guest crooned on an unrecognizable cover of "Catch My Heart," by '80s German doom metal act Warlock . On 2014's Piano Nights, B&DCOG eschewed the Rhodes in favor of a Yamaha digital piano (that sounds almost exactly like an acoustic grand) while Clöser's breathy saxophone vibratos trailed behind, supplanting it with a tonal sense of hollowness. Ever a study in contradictions, Bohren's Piano Nights was at once the band's most "upbeat" and their coldest and thinnest-sounding.