Landers

In 2006, Christopher Colm Morrin showed up to his first German gig. Going under the moniker Robotnik back then, a friend had put him forward to play at a business hotel in Karlsruhe, where he performed in the basement to an audience of five men in suits. He enjoyed the experience of gigging outside of Ireland, which prompted him to organise his first Berlin show just a few months later. Fast forward 5 years of experimental folk performances at Whelan’s and poetry nights in the magical basement of International Bar, and Christopher was back in Berlin to stay.

As he reminisces on the “conveyor belt of madness” that was the Dublin folk scene, he tells me he misses the bond that the community had at the time, but credits his move to Berlin as “an expansion of the mind.” Acquiring an atelier in Neukölln, Christopher’s focus switched from music to painting and writing poetry for a few years, before a chance encounter with drummer, Max Von Der Goltz encouraged him to start making music again. Through Max, bassist Paul Breiting was recruited, and the threesome began playing together under what would come to be known as Landers. “From the first rehearsal, I thought, ‘This going well!’,” Christopher tells me. “We all felt secure even though our insecurities were out there, which is when experimentation comes to the fore.” With influences spanning Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis and Sean Nós singer Joe Heaney to ambient sounds and drones, it is easy to understand why experimentation is important to the group.

Pleased with how things were going, and even though Landers were only playing as a unit for a matter of months at this stage, the band spontaneously decided to record something. Renting out a room in KAOS — a warehouse near Schöneweide — they set up a small interface and a couple of mics and enlisted the help of Aidan Floatinghome. Four days of recording resulted in six tracks, but the lads decided against releasing the KAOS session as an album. “With the psychotic split of the band, some tracks are more traditional and some are more like experimental jams,” Christopher explains. They opted to instead stagger their releases in two track packages, and obviously made good use of their time in lockdown, because two of four parts of the session are already available to the public. Just Thinking followed the April release, Clear Blue Sky, this month, and Landers are expecting to have their third segment out by February.