The title of Wave Tank’s 8-track album, RawMantiSch (2025, Bandcamp), 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.
But 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?’
