New Release – Frozen Smile by splurge.art

New Release – Frozen Smile by splurge.art

splurge.art is the project-name of the German collaboration between Andi (music and recording) and Ralf (lyrics and concept). They have released several singles and albums together. Their new track ‘Frozen Smile / Shaping the Landscape’ will be out on 4th June.

What’s the song about?

Ralf: “The basis for the song Frozen Smile is the memory of a company visit and a photo. Both memories brought the horror of land mines before my eyes and made me write this song. While the first two verses describe these memories, the third verse is an appeal to take the suffering described as motivation in order to stand up for peace“

“The memories itself go back a few years. The text was written by Ralf in 2020, after the release of ‘The Sunflower Tales’. As with this album and also with the follow-up ‘Begegnung mit dem alten Meister’, Ralf first wrote the lyrics, which were then set to music by Andi.”

“The song will be released as a single on June 4th and later as part of the album “What we are gettin’.The first two splurge.art albums are concept albums. The third album ‘What we are gettin’ will be a collection of more political songs that deal with the question of how we want to live in the future in the face of climate change.”

Is this release different from your previous releases?

Ralf: “For us every release is a complete different experience. Only the base condition is always the same. I write the lyrics and give the frame for the concept. Then Andi starts doing songwriting and first recordings. After the last album with lyrics in German language (it’s the story of the river Rhein – told in the perspective of the river) the next album will be in English language. This makes sense because the concept and meaning of the album is related to the entire planet.“

What’s your favourite memory of writing and/or recording?

Andi: “The learning process in doing songwriting and much more experience in recording and mastering give much more options every time we start the next album. So we trust more in our ideas and can do more experiments with new instruments, sounds and song-structures. We’re not a live band due to the fact that all instruments are played by me, but lots of sessions and solo performances find the way to YouTube and PromoVideos. We think that this will have a deeper impact on further recordings where we plan to do more live-recordings.“

“The song frozen-smile was written just on a Hammond B3. To bring more rhythm into the track Andi added more instruments. From the beginning the vocal melody was the same, but even in the last recording Andi mispronounced the word “pitiable“. The sound of the word “pitaiabel“ was completely burned into Andi’s brain. It took up to 30 takes until he finally reached a sufficient result regarding the “pitiable kids”.”

Andi: “I’m quite sure that Ralf is always looking for strange words that I’m not able to sing. I remember one line in the first album: “This fortunate coincidence…“. Come on! Try to sing these words!“

admin