Karlsruhe, Germany’s emotional screamo act LYPURA just released their digital single through Twisted Chords and we took the chance to sit down with them, give it a proper track by track breakdown and serve you a little commentary on the local alt/DIY scene of Karlsruhe, and spice it up with some recommendations of bands you might have not heard about.
Artwork by Michael Wallner
LYPURA live shows:
20.06.2019 Prag @Clown and Bard
21.06.2019 Roßwein @JUHA w/ I Recover, Erai, Lessoner
22.06.2019 Leipzig @Privat
23.07.2019 Karlsruhe @P8 w/ Graf Orlock
„behind all these walls and above my head“
Basically the song is about (urban) isolation. Although we spend our daily lives among a lot of people we rarely have real emotional and human contact to the people living around us, which can lead to loneliness despite the fact that there are people around who might feel exactly the same thing and who would also need someone to talk to and laugh with. This is especially true for people who spend a lot of time working and therefore lack the time to have adequate social contacts, even though they might want to have some. In the end, it seems to be a kind of circle which you can’t escape. While writing this, we actually thought about „Allein unter vielen“ by German Hardcore band EAVES (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m_vLrFljIM) which seems to go roughly into the same direction.
“…there is nothing but torment”
There are a not a lot words in this song. We wanted it to refer to the first song and in our view it describes the eventual outcome of the problems talked about in „behind all these walls…“. When you often don’t have enough time for friends, family, hobbies or just yourself because of work duties, other tasks and obligations life is far less beautiful than it could be.
We are of course by far not the first to say this but for us, band practice and music in general is a way to escape this problem. In this case, we also wanted to try something new and different by not meeting in our rehearsal room but meeting in David’s living room where we wrote and recorded the song in one day while also, partially, not playing our „normal“ instruments but changing to digital production in some parts (drums and bass).
Recording vocals for this was quite funny because we had to do this under a blanket to dampen the screaming.
local screamo scene
That’s a tough one because there is no local screamo scene in our city. We think that actually we are the only band doing this kind of sound in Karlsruhe, at least we are not aware of any other band doing this style.
But of course there is a local punk/hardcore/diy-scene which helped us and in which you get to know people by for example sharing rehearsal rooms, setting up shows together and meeting at shows. David and Sebastian’s former band JUVENALIS shared a rehearsal room with hardcore band ENDE/AUS, which in part became now also defunct crust/hardcore band CRUEL FRIENDS. JUVENALIS also played shows with SAILING ON. Caro, SAILING ON’s singer and David and Sebastian now also play in dark post-hardcore band HESTER. Very briefly Sebastian and Daniel also played in HUXELY together and Daniel played in IT ALL TAKES PLACE in his former hometown. Quite a few years back there also was KAISHAKUNIN and today there is, among many others, post-metal band WATERED. So even if there is no specific screamo scene here, there is a diy-music scene which is connected in all kinds of different ways and genre boundaries are very often not really important. Today, one of the meeting points is definitely a venue called P8.
Quite recently there was a concert collective called HOME AWAY FROM HOME SHOWS who did a lot of screamo shows. However they kind of quit and often the turnout at screamo shows was quite low, unfortunately – which tells you about the „screamo scene“ here. Nevertheless, sometimes two of us also do shows with DURCHSÄGEN KONZERTE where the focus is more on emo and screamo, but this is not on a regular basis.
cool bands and record recommendations
If it comes to screamo/emo/hardcore there are nonetheless some bands in the wider area which you should listen to for example LA PETITE MORT / LITTLE DEATH, MASADA, KARINA KVIST, HEXZLAHR (not active anymore), MASKROS, TE:RS, ANOTHER FIVE MINUTES or KISHOTE.
Apart from that we listen to a lot of THE 1975, THE HOTELIER, VULFPECK, IDLES, RAINER MARIA, LYSISTRATA, OLD MAN GLOOM, KATZENSTREIK and CLOUD NOTHINGS at the moment.
