Nils Wülker - Go (2020) Hi Res

The title means "go" or also "Los!" and is therefore as if tailor-made for a musician, a person like Nils Wülker - always on the move, curious and forward thinking, his head full of musical ideas, a man who moves with his family from Hamburg to Munich because he is closer to the mountains there, a man who became a father for the first time a year ago and writes, produces, records his most exciting album almost in parallel. Everything on Go

"GO" is Nils Wülker's excursion into elegant electronics and completes an album trilogy that has been experienced over at least five years. For this album, the at least as charismatic as visionary trumpeter/songwriter has seduced us into pop with "UP" and into hip hop with "ON". His tenth studio album, with all the analogue synthesizers, the arpeggiator, the organic loops and beats, is "at most not live", as the "great melodicist" (Die Zeit) says, but in contrast to some of his most beautiful and emotional songs to date - and the most direct and dynamic trumpet playing beyond his live albums and concerts - it is captivating. Produced with Ralf Christian Mayer, known from working with Clueso or Fanta 4, and completely composed by himself, the ten pieces of "GO" show the most extreme and energetic side of the multiple award-winning musician to date - recorded with members of his popular live band, plus Viennese keyboarder Albin Janoska, the sound expert behind SOHN, and American trumpeter Theo Croker in the anything but sterile corona distance duo "Highline"

"For this production it was good to have done the live album right before that, as contradictory as it sounds", says Nils Wülker and explains right away what "GO" owes to his live album "Decade", released in 2019. "I have now worked more 'live' in the studio, I was able to bring more dynamics into the trumpet playing, to take this human element with me through the trumpet. It has also strengthened my way of working. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I got help with the sounds, but the songs were all written completely by myself again, without any co-writing, like on the last two albums Another not very obvious aspect in the creation process of "GO" was the program "The Art of the Duo", with which Nils Wülker went on tour with his longtime guitar partner Arne Jansen at the end of 2019. Just as in this enthusiastically received concert series, the trumpet here is not only a melody and solo instrument, but takes on other functions - looped into surfaces, filtered, rhythmically chopped up or alienated

Even though "GO" had its beginnings at a time when at most virologists at Corona did not think of a Mexican beer brand, it fits perfectly into the current situation. "I have tried to accept the situation as it is and use it creatively", says Nils Wülker and refers to various "Isolation-Buster actions" on the album. "The thought of sounding out for myself what I can only generate with my non-harmony instrument in soundscapes was something I had already had before Corona, especially after the duo tour, during which we often accompanied each other with our own loops, but now it just fitted perfectly This becomes obvious in the above mentioned collaboration with Theo Croker, where both musicians were "alone, not lonely" during the recordings, as Nils Wülker calls it, because although everyone was sitting in his studio, they were still able to be creative and exchange ideas together from a distance

"In any other situation I probably would not have thought of contacting Theo Croker", says Nils Wülker. "But when I saw a post at Instagram in which he wrote 'use these times' several times and advised me to practice more, to stay positive, to find his strength, I simply wrote to him spontaneously Thus "Highline" became a trumpet duo as inspired as it is inspiring, with Theo Croker playing openly and Nils Wülker playing with a mute - over a pumping pulsating electro-groove, where part of the accompaniment consists of a rhythmically chopped and looped trumpet surface

The cinematic ballad "The Frame" also begins with such a trumpet mutated to a soundscape, before it explodes into all kinds of whimpering, creaking, calling synths and the glorious trumpet. In the dramatic "The You Of Now" the bassline comes exceptionally from the piano, the introduction to "Seat 47" plays a dark and dirty synthi-bass line, a possible reminiscence of eighties funk stars like D-Train or George Duke. Front and center, so to speak in the eye of the electronic storm, radiate again and again these haunting melodies, for which Nils Wülker is known and loved as a musician and composer - they float confidently over wide areas, in addition the drum sound as a foundation sometimes crisply live, then again directly programmed. "Blow Up" is what the 42-year-old calls the most striking and extreme example of a solo electronic performance: 29 trumpet tracks including a kick drum made of mouthpiece pops and a backbeat of valve clatter - everything about "Blow Up" is trumpet, created in the home studio alone, the technical possibilities in isolation used as creatively as possible - childcare during the day, album production at night

"GO" is progress in every respect, a new, excitingly different chapter in his creative work, a triumph. The new album builds on Nils Wülker's career to date: nine, multiple award-winning and chart-steeped studio and one and a half live productions, working with such diverse musicians as Craig Armstrong, Omara Portundo, Dominic Miller, Mocky, Peter Vetesse, Samy Deluxe, Marteria, Max Mutzke and many more. Always in motion, always on "GO", Nils Wülker presents his musical cosmos also in his radio show "Offbeat" at 917XFM. In addition, the freshly baked father is a passionate mountaineer and "expert trainer for alpine tours" at the German Alpine Club. It goes up and ahead - GO.