Wave Tank’s 8-track album, RawMantiSch (2025, Bandcamp) is a clever manipulation of faders and buttons, employing as best as it can the capabilities of a number of different synths and vocal filters. Without overloading the songs, the compositional approach is based on simplicity, repetition and imagination. In this way, loud, weird and monotonous bass lines, for instance, stay interesting and fresh throughout the songs, allowing beats and rythmic patterns to create the required atmosphere for the story that is communicated. In the end, whether inspired by personal obsessions (track No 3 – Christian Death’s, Dogs, and Dead Kennedys’, At My Job), or referencing personal favourites (track No 7 – Chris & Cosey’s, In Ecstacy), the Neo-Romantics of the 80s, the punk ethos and the goth rock aesthetics introduce a feeling of urgency to take action. But why take action and how is it encouraged?
The title of the album, RawMantiSch, makes immediately a connection with ‘romanticism’. Romantisch is the German word for ‘romantic’. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the Romantic movement in the arts was associated with heightened emotional expression and nature. It was a product of rural communities, valuing the countryside over the city. For the romantics, the city was unnatural, a monster.
However, although the title does sound like ‘Romantisch’, it uses instead the word ‘raw’. Raw, of course, can mean raw or uncooked food, as it has come straight from nature. Moreover, ‘raw’ can be understood as raw emotions – i.e. feelings which are unfiltered by civilisation and societal norms, and they can often be seen as honest, frank and realistic. Raw feelings sometimes are valued more, as ‘raw’ is also used to mean strong or intense.
Wave Tank’s song Human Memories is exactly about this. It looks back at earlier stages of human life on earth to bring our attention to what valuable things we have lost in the name of extreme urbanisation, digitalisation, human-to-human connection, increased separation from nature, and more:
- ‘Do you remember the colours and the sunset?’, ‘Do you remember the rain?’, ‘Do you remember the trees?’
Similarly, Do You Want Time to Get Slow is a direct attack to city life:
- ‘Do you feel time getting slow when you walk away this modern city?’, ‘All puppets want you to work, to work in high speed.’, ‘Do you want to break the clocks?’
