The Hirsch Effekt: The Unwanted Guest
Consistency is the holy grail of the music industry, hoping you can continue to perform at the highest level and push yourselves further with each passing release. The talented German triple threat, THE HIRSCH EFFEKT are a band which astounds your senses with their awe-inspiring material and 2021’s SOLITAER EP was a masterful display of creativity, with each individual writing their own track with little to no involvement from the other members. We caught up with bassist/vocalist Ilja John Lappin as they were gearing up to release their latest full-length effort, Urian. Needless to say, he was juggling many different responsibilities.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the album release but it’s actually a thousand other things happening at the same time. I work as a session musician and sometimes I’m a little dependent on that as sadly you can’t sit at home and make great art all of the time. You have to take care of things at Station B while you’re actually at Station A and then you get back home and things pile up and then you throw in the daily business stuff, organising and coming up with frequent content. It can be time consuming and I’m not a big fan of that side of things.”
The wheels of the music industry are now back in full rotation but the pandemic inflicted a severe blow on most well-laid plans, ushering musicians into isolation. For some it was a living hell but Illja took it in his stride and took full advantage of the less hectic schedule.
“It was awesome to have that freedom and just write about how we were feeling at the time. We tend to get inspired by life itself and what is going on around us. Those experiences shape who we are as people. I just had this great, creative drive and I felt like I could just keep writing and writing. Not all of them landed on the album but some did,” he says. “Every album from THE HIRSCH EFFEKT is a different kind of experience and we always try to avoid repeating ourselves. This time we were more inspired by the atmosphere of a song and how we could create that with our instruments and different production techniques. We’ve done the whole showing off our skills and what we can do on previous albums and we’re not super interested in doing that at the moment, we wanted to focus more on creating feelings and emotions.”
Urian witnessed THE HIRSCH EFFEKT become more expansive than ever before, introducing a lot of classical elements and orchestration. This felt like second nature to Ilja and actually allowed him to reconnect with his younger self. “When I was eight years old my parents encouraged me to learn the cello, I actually hated it and having to take lessons at first but it got me in touch with classical music. I switched over to the bass guitar when I started getting into rock and metal and experiencing this whole new world. When I started doing my music studies I started to get back into playing the cello again as being able to play a string instrument would benefit me greatly. It allowed me to improvise more and come up with weird melodies and incorporate them into my songwriting. There are quite a few pieces which include the cello on this album.”
The artwork for each release is treated with the utmost care and respect as the visuals can be just as important as the music itself. THE HIRSCH EFFEKT are renowned for their eccentric, evocative imagery and this is thanks to their long-standing, fruitful relationship with artist Alejandro Chavetta. “Alejandro has done all of our artwork, sadly we’ve never met him in real life. I sent him a couple of demo’s and lyrics and how it was inspired by Goethe‘s Faust and he really got hooked on the idea of the unwanted guest and connotations of the devil,” explains Ilja. “At the time he was experimenting with AI, which was very new at the time, these days it’s kind of yesterday’s news as the world is evolving so fast. He started combining AI with his own work and came to me with a bunch of ideas and we were blown away. He never explains his motives too much, he lets his art speak for him and I love that as it allows for everyone to interpret it in their own way.”
Urian is out now via Long Branch Records.
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