The band newcomers from Düsseldorf are basically facing a problem: Do I pick up the city's tonnally heavy music history, or do I simply make music completely past it? The three young men from Stabil Elite have shouldered the weight and balance it with the greatest elegance: On their debut album they venture deep into the legendary Krautrock mecca and continue the story. We let them show us their city.

No gliding at all, no flowing, zero boundlessness. Instead stop-and-go, the high-speed train no longer winds elegantly through Germany just before the finish line, it seems on the contrary to stumble over Hamm, Dortmund, Bochum, Essen and Duisburg. Then, finally, Düsseldorf - the shiny outer shell, the Rhine side - the city of facades. Upon exiting, all too fittingly bright light, which makes the environment appear in a radiant, optimistic, urnostalgic technocracy. Even nature, which has always been lost here in a bafflingly natural way and has come to terms with it in a wonderful way, cannot help but look a little more beautiful this morning. In the city, steel-gray buildings and stiff-necked people.

If there ever was a utopia of West Germany, it was conceived here. Millions of music player stores of the brand Bang & Olufsen, wonderful shops of Gosch Sylt, the hair salon chain Mod's Hair, the whole little Kö. There are branches of the Deutsche Post and Karstadt here that are as big as the Berlin Olympic Stadium - and they all tell the story of a fine post-war modernity with money, so a little tasteful and distinguished and yet provincial like a Märklin train set. The capital together-mucked in the Ruhr area was already gathered together in the state capital for far too many years and flown back and forth by the local airport, as if that would still represent the most natural thing in the world to anyone.

"Everything I touch immediately turns to gold / I have to starve" Stabil Elite sing carelessly on their debut EP. From the Midas myth, they now take off on their album, also released by Italic, for the big ride through Düsseldorf. "With the horse through the city" to a "glass bride". You see a lot of "metal on concrete" and above all "steel beams / between the desire / the gray supports". The three-piece band is, and names it as such, in the "time-traveling rush" and we are happy to accompany them for a little bit: three young men sitting between a lot of chairs. Their subject in school is named after the city they live in: Düsseldorf. And Stabil Elite are the new model students.

Düsseltal

Lucas Croon looks like Holger Hiller. The same rugged presence as the singer of Palais Schaumburg, the same Nazi haircut. From the train station we drive directly to his band's rehearsal room. On a sign it says Düsseltal - "would be a good band name", Croon says into the blue. Martin Sonnensberger is already waiting there, Nikolai Szymanski arrives a little later. You talk a little about how it feels to be in such a city in your mid-20s, what you do there. That their album title "Douze Pouze" is also named that because it sounds like Talkie Walkie, that album by Air, because of which you stopped producing hip-hop beats on the Atari. About how they all play all instruments, that this is really important to them.

And maybe that's why they wiggle out of the conversation one after another and around the various instruments and eventually just start jamming. The young men perform the great boys thing before our eyes. It is simply so logical that this kind of together-in-the-basement-music-making represents the obviously rightest thing in the history of the world. Logic commands it: Being here = making music with the boys. Light a cigarette once in a while, talk something strange to yourself once in a while - they send tones through the sequencer, stroke the expensive Georg-Neumann microphone, touch an electro-mechanical Pianet from the 60s in passing and gently press the keys of their Korg Polysix and Korg Sigma synthesizers. On the Minimog, "Stadt Düsseldorf" is engraved (A teacher wanted to throw it away, just before she did, she asked Nikolai if he could do something with it. He could). In such a room, shy smartness translates itself like by magic into confidently executed gestures on the equipment - the calm, effortless mega-coolness. To pee you go into a small side room and hold your penis in a large washbasin. It becomes clear once again: The rehearsal room is basically the salon of the boys' rooms. We are here, everyone else is outside.

Stabil Elite do exactly what they otherwise claim never to do before our eyes: jam. The krautiest Krautrock thing ever. Making space music freed from everything, heavily psychedelic, meandering in complex structures, while constantly striving for the cosmos, in long hours and pause-less days. Instead, they want their rehearsal room to be understood as a studio, here all their songs are recorded themselves. Whereby they again serve the other Düsseldorf cliché: the studio nerd, the Kraftwerk person, the clear analytical musician, who knows first and then plays, the anti-stoner. Lucas Croon and his boys are constantly smoking. They smoke, but they don't jam. They make Krautrock, but they also make catchy pop music. The Kraut comrades offer on their debut album the most contemporary and above all the most comprehensive mélange of Düsseldorf that has been presented since the invention of Düsseldorf as a music concept. Since Kraftwerk, DAF, Can, Neu!, Krupps, Fehlfarben, Kreidler, Mouse on Mars. The super-analysis. As if they were addressing the rest of the pop world from this place here, where they grew up: "Go ahead/ I stay where I am." - the only lyrics of their piece "Agent Orange", it is located exactly in the middle of their album. Below it a Can-like jazz fever, above it Neu!-like guitar licks, in between always a Kraftwerk-like whining. Stabil Elite don't sample, they play everything themselves and press the right buttons at the right time.

Something new in the West

It is not simply that three boys 40 years later reflect on the musical designs of their hometown. No, this form of musical appropriation and inscription is so blatantly displayed that you could almost find it cheeky. A Kraftwerk reference seems to be played out like conceptual art. Nikolai explains: "While composing this song, it turned out and it was allowed to then. We had the feeling that this was expected of us in advance and for us it was then also a bit of a joke - nevertheless we also find the piece very beautiful. We then consistently finished it, added drums, early Michael Rother meets Kraftwerk's Autobahn." 

The play with socialization takes on amusing features at times, for example when the EP appears on the death anniversary of Neu! drummer Klaus Dinger. They elegantly stole their name from the film "Das Millionenspiel". The anticipation of reality TV from the year 1970 was interrupted by advertising inserts, which stood out then through highly sexualized subjects and were sponsored by a fictional Stabil-Elite corporation. The title melody of the television film was, logically, written by Inner Space Production, so by Czukay, Schmidt and Liebezeit, so by Can. An even funnier pun is that in one of the advertising productions a "Kling-Klang knife" is also advertised - and thus by some means there is also the chance that the band Kraftwerk could have borrowed the name of their studio there. The famous Kling-Klang Studio was originally located at Mintropstraße 16 in Düsseldorf, was founded in 1970 and is described in the biography of the robot band as the transformation from the music project "Organisation" to the legend Kraftwerk. When Lucas Croon later drives me into the backyard of Mintropstraße 16, nothing there reminds of the glorious past anymore. Behind the white curtains it must have been, above the small entrance door there is really a sign: Elektro-Müller. From Kraftwerk, Elektro remains, the reality is sometimes not so unoriginal at all.

In the rehearsal room of Stabil Elite, which is located under the Croon parents' restaurant, hangs a faded photograph of Charly Weiss, the legendary Düsseldorf drummer, who also once played with Kraftwerk and later found his musical soulmate in Helge Schneider. Weiss died two years ago, most recently he was still mumbling and walking through the pedestrian zone in a bathrobe, he had set up his drum set in the bathroom of his small apartment, Martin Sonnensberger tells. And, that he was very smart. So smart that Martin had to surrender after a single intense conversation in a bar. It was simply too much.

Mucker

How far can you dive into history? When do you lose yourself in it? 40 years ago and also a little later with DAF and Fehlfarben, it was always about presenting a new, original music concept. Düsseldorf, that meant doing something that had never existed before. A total claim to independence, which is hardly comprehensible today. The extreme contemporaneity of Stabil Elite results from a feigned revival gesture, under which the productive re-sorting and rewriting of old material flourishes from a strictly limited cosmos. On "Douze Pouze" you find less the retelling of a stone-old story, than an elegant continuation, which expertly, reduced and concentrated refers to a Muckertum that includes Cologne just as much as Die Sterne, for example in the matter-of-fact, very accented spoken word. Stabil Elite don't sample, they play everything themselves and press the right buttons at the right time.

In the evening you meet in the Salon des Amateurs, the residence of the local art-music-bohemia, which is attached to the famous Kunsthalle: Here, in the Rhenish version of the Pudelclub, in this foyer of the Arts Düsseldorf, a silent film is accompanied by music today, the audience hears in high-culture silence, and you observe once again in peace these three Düsseldorf boys, who stand around at the edge with their very big, very good-looking girlfriends in the tasteful bar: on the one hand the constant tendency towards cool-artistic distance, which you can trace in their manner, their way of dressing and on the stylish cover artworks - on the other hand, they actually seem much younger than they are. Like well-dressed, quite posh high school boys who have never come out of this city and instead of stretching their little big heads into the world, they have always stuck them into this Düsseldorf pot. The freedom found by a kind of self-imposed house arrest: "Here we can do what we want. It doesn't feel like looking back at all. In Berlin we would probably have dissolved a long time ago", Martin says and takes a good swig of beer. Above all, of course, that was all, that is still always natural. So again flowing, again freed, yet boundless? "It is good to live by the river, that is very good." Lucas Croon says in farewell.

Credits:
Text: Timo Feldhaus
Image: Adrian Crispin

Krautkameraden

The Düsseldorf band Stabil Elite, dressed by Carhartt.

Credits:
Photography: Adrian Crispin
Styling and production: Timo Feldhaus

Many thanks to Philipp Maiburg and the Salon des Amateurs.

Originally published in De:Bug issue #160, 2012