It’s easy to get swept away in the motorik synth sequences and floating cadences on Phantom Horse’s latest, Primal Forms. An almost-supernatural quality imbues the kosmische structures with sculptural harmonics and neon frequencies. Detailed accoutrements spit out dot-matrix style, pointillistic melodies, a balance to the free-flowing rhythms driving Primal Forms forward. Phantom Horse builds sonic architecture that is rigid and coated in emotions that are anything but. Primal Forms is precise but never sterile, both mechanical and feral.
Primal Forms is OUT NOW on Umor Rex.
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What are your earliest memories of sound and music? Were there particular moments or recordings that made you first aware of what sound could actually do?
Ulf: Growing up in the countryside in the 1980s meant living in two very different sound environments. On the one hand, there were the sounds of nature – bats with their clicks and chirps, hooting owls, the crackling of the forest, and much more. On the other hand, there was the world of video games and sci-fi movies, which, as a kid, I inhabited with the utmost joy. Both environments had a major impact and showed me, in very different ways, how sound can shape space, experience, and perception. Like at dusk, the sounds of bats transformed the field and the trees beyond our garden into a different space. Although I wasn’t consciously aware of this as a child—it was, if anything, just an imprint that only became clear in hindsight.
Niklas: For me, it was quite similar. I was probably less well-equipped regarding video games, but those glorious Commodore 64 sounds were really influential. Maybe also the deep droning hum from inside a car: my parents bought an old house when I was small and renovated it – and when it was nappy time my grandparents put me in the back of the car and just drove around. Probably that’s very much an eighties thing…
Growing up in Germany, what was the musical environment like for each of you? Were there records in the house, or was it more about what was coming through the radio, through friends?
Ulf: The musical environment in the house was pretty standard: my two older sisters listened to chart music, and my parents weren’t really into music. My musical influences came mostly from friends, fanzines, and, not least, 120 Minutes on MTV. In northern Germany, there was a large, vibrant punk/DIY scene that played an important role in my musical socialisation as a teenager.
Niklas: I think I got my first LP as a birthday present from my aunt: a 1985 collection of hits – it had songs like “Take on Me” by A-HA on it. Great! My parents always listen to music, and my father, at almost eighty, is still collecting CDs and vinyl. He also handed down his old record player, which I still own. And one day he brought this battered old drum kit home, which he had gotten from a colleague – that’s how I started making music, practising with punk bands at home. Probably my father sometimes regretted buying the drum kit…
How did the two of you find each other, and how did Phantom Horse come out of that? What were you each bringing to it at the start that felt like it could become something together?
Niklas: Ulf and I grew up in the same region in Northern Germany, although in different towns. As teenagers, we both went to a lot of punk shows in the nineties and started playing in bands – it was a really active scene back then, and we kept bumping into each other at shows but were not really close friends. Fast forward some years, I had moved to Hamburg to study, went into the yard to bring out the trash one day, and saw someone waving at me – it was Ulf, who on a completely different path had also ended up in Hamburg as my neighbour.
We decided that this coincidence meant that we had to start making music together.
Ulf: In the beginning, we used to meet like once a week and jam endlessly for the whole night with the equipment that was at hand, and slowly, the elements that would become the cornerstones of our sound began to take shape. I was already messing around with electronics and tape manipulation and stuff for quite some time, and in 2005 or 2006, I finally got my first modular synth. Perhaps, in the beginning, I brought a sort of tactile approach to electronic music, driven by a fascination with rhythms and repetition. Well, but only a very small part of these endless jams has ever been released, which is most probably a good thing.
You’ve got this great new record, Primal Forms, and it’s been on regular rotation over here. It’s really fantastic. Six years is a long stretch between albums. How did that time shape the record? Were these compositions slowly accumulating, or did something specific open things up?
Ulf: Thank you very much for the kind words regarding Primal Forms! For no apparent reason, the usual interval between our records has been three years. Primal Forms was also finished after three years, true to that rhythm. But after some time, it turned out that we were not happy with the original tracks and sequence. That could be referred to as a moment when things opened up, because in the end one track was cut, we completely reworked the others, and added some new ones—which again took maybe two years.
Though I really dig a spontaneous vibe in certain things, with Phantom Horse we like slow cooking, because I think only with time you can really tell whether a track is finished or holds up. And we tend to spend a long time refining tracks and are quite cautious before releasing anything.
Niklas: Probably working at even greater distance than before has also slowed us down a bit. Usually, we would meet for a few days, record a lot of material, and then refine that. This time we had to work much more by sending ideas from Spain to the Netherlands and back.
The press notes describe the music as “turned away from the world” while still remaining connected to current developments. I find that a fascinating tension to hold. How do you think about that balance in the studio? Is the withdrawal part of the process itself?
Ulf: That’s a tough question. I don’t think this balance is something we really set out to achieve consciously. I think we are both quite interested in diverse cultural, political, and other topics that definitely inspire and inform our work. Working in the studio and making music is, for me, a state of being in ‘the zone’. With this record, it was also about finding the essence or core of these tracks, while avoiding distractions to achieve a more focused result. In a way, this could be seen as a form of withdrawal or concentration. But I wouldn’t describe it as turning away from the world. In this sense, the studio becomes a place where outside impressions can settle and transform instead of being reproduced unprocessed. So the withdrawal isn’t about isolation but about creating some distance to understand what actually remains meaningful.
Niklas: Yeah, I agree. I think that the current state of the world can make you think about escapism a lot, trying to get away from things, while that isn’t really an option either.
At the same time, I would say that making music that requires patience from the listener because it evolves slowly instead of offering catchy melodies every twelve seconds is also an act of forcing people to sort of turn away from the world for a while and focus on something. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s what I experience with certain music, and I would be really happy if we could achieve that with our music for some people.
Sequencing feels essential to how Primal Forms works (and as someone who can obsess over sequencing their own records, I appreciate that so much!) It really does ask to be heard in full. How did the two of you approach that? Did the album’s structure emerge early, or did it come together at the end?
Ulf: That’s something that crystallizes over the course of working on a record. Some tunes already have their place in the sequence in them from the beginning. For example, it was somehow pretty clear to us that “Schattenfunktion” is the first. Others have to get their place at the end.
Niklas: And as Ulf explained, the process of working on the album was really long for us and involved re-thinking the whole thing at least once. I think maybe even for us, it came as a bit of a surprise how well the songs work together as an album in the end.
The phrase “dances of mechanical birds” stuck with me. There’s something about the polyrhythms on this record that feels simultaneously precise and slightly feral. Where does that danceability come from? Is it something you are intentionally seeking out or developing, or does it just sort of happen on its own?
Niklas: I can’t speak for Ulf, but I’d guess that we’re both not great dancers, unfortunately… But – I think that we’re both interested in rhythm and polymetric a lot, having come to that from different angles, for example, the polymetric percussion tracks by Moondog, minimal composers, or the synth stuff by Ursula Bogner. Using synths and sequencers will always make your music precise and maybe a bit strict – still finding groove, variation and maybe something feral in that is a challenge for us.
Ulf: I think the polymetric aspect and the focus on rhythm and repetition have been there since we started, if I remember correctly. To me, there is a certain value in two or more things, each with its own rhythm, interacting in a way that they keep each other fresh, enhance one another, or generate something new – without anything being wasted or unnecessarily consumed. Plus, I love it when the mechanical and the organic come together or are in balance or merge into another. That’s why I was so pleased to see this metaphor in the description, because the dance of the mechanical birds expresses exactly that. In that sense, this ‘danceability’ is perhaps inherent or inevitable.
Working together over so many years, how does the collaboration actually function? Do you each have defined roles, or is it more fluid than that?
Niklas: Thinking about that question, we just figured out that we forgot to celebrate our 20th band anniversary some time in the last few years, haha! Well, I think our collaboration changed over time. As Ulf said, we started out jamming endlessly in his Hamburg flat, while later, living in different cities, we could only meet from time to time. That always means recording a lot of stuff and then editing, adding tracks, removing tracks, etc.
Ulf: Regarding roles, there’s no strict rulebook. Well, I’ve never really touched a guitar, unlike Niklas, but that’s basically it. We both come up with ideas, record, and mix tracks. The same goes for communication with labels and everything else. So it keeps shifting over time – “fluid’ probably nails it.
What does the studio or workspace look like for Phantom Horse? I’m curious about the physical environment where this music gets made.
Niklas: There is not really one space, as we’ve been making music together for quite some years and in different spatial constellations. There was Ulf’s old flat in Hamburg, after that a rehearsal space next to a parking garage under a half-derelict building on the outskirts of Hamburg, then my flat in Berlin, an attic in the Netherlands, and a flat in the hills in southern Spain looking down on the Mediterranean. Somehow, however, for some reason, there were almost always two tables arranged in a U-shape with a lot of synths, drum machines, and effects pedals on them – add to that a lot of beer and unhealthy food, and we were ready to go.
Ulf: Nowadays, we each have a home studio where we can work on music remotely or together. But the arrangement that Niklas sketched is more or less the same, only the diet got healthier.
Niklas: These days, it could even involve cooking a meal. Imagine that! We’re getting old…
What were the biggest challenges you had to overcome in making Primal Forms? What surprised you the most?
Ulf: Looking back, there came a point when we wanted the record to be finished and declared it ready for release, but we had become satisfied with it a bit too early. So finding the motivation, persistence, and patience to rework something that already felt finished was a big challenge.
Niklas: We got some really honest feedback on the initial version of the album, which was not easy to stomach. But we found that it was actually on point and very helpful, and after the initial disappointment, we started reworking. That was not really a surprise, but something new for us and a very important experience, I’d say.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Niklas: Bird sounds. It’s absolutely unbelievable what strange, varied, and beautiful kinds of sounds those animals can produce. And for some reason, they also keep coming up in our music, either as synths that sound like birds or in album tracks.
Ulf: I second that!
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
