CONNY OCHS – Wahn und Sinn [LP+CD]

Wahn und Sinn by Conny Ochs released October 20th, 2023 by Exile On Mainstream Records. 140g black pure virgin vinyl. 3mm spined sleeve, printed 4c + high-gloss laminate. Polylined inner sleeve. Lyric sheet in German and English. 1st press limited to 500 copies. CD included. Tracklisting: Side A 01 Turin 02 Risse 03 Ding 04 Hickhack Side B 01 Taub und Laut 02 Welle 03 Grimassen 04 Melancholia 05 Lumos Four and a half years have passed since Conny Ochs’ last album, “Doom Folk”. During the Corona lockdowns, Conny Ochs had the time to go through a collection of notebooks that he had collected during his time in Hamburg, Berlin and while traveling as a singer in various bands and which contained poems and lyrics in German language. The idea of publishing selected poems as a book became an affair of the heart. Initially, “Wahn und Sinn” was to be published as a poetry book independently. But then Ochs wrote some more lyrics, again in German language which turned into songs and got recorded as demo and passed on to Tobias Vethake aka Sicker Man, with whom Ochs had already worked in the band project TRIALOGOS. “I sent him my unedited demos and asked him to throw away the instruments and just keep the vocals and harmonic arrangements.” Ochs describes the experimental approach of the album “Wahn und Sinn”. The aim was to avoid the singer/songwriter approach that had previously characterized Conny Ochs’ music. The initial experiment turned into an album whose cover, for the first time, does not feature artwork by the artist himself, but a picture by Scottish artist Abi Salvesen. Here, too, a departure from his usual way of working is manifested. As an experimental excursion and reflection, “Wahn und Sinn” thus forms the transition to a new chapter in Ochs’s creative work, which is to be followed by a new official album as early as spring 2024. “Wahn und Sinn” is released as an LP with an accompanying CD. The book is available seperately or bundled with LP and CD. The content of the disc complements the content of the book, feat. poems from the years 2000-2010. In other words: the tracks on the LP and CD are no songs created from the poems. They stand on their own. Ochs: “When I look at both together now, I find that WAHN UND SINN also tells the story that seems to be the core of my songs until now: getting lost in order to find yourself.”