Our Ceasing Voice have spent twenty years repeatedly becoming a band again. The Innsbruck post-rock group started when guitarist Sebastian Obermeir was 19, but he reckons their genuinely active years might add up to only five or six. Their fourth full-length, “The Origin of Everything“, arrives after another gap of almost a decade, carrying songs left unfinished before the pandemic alongside newer writing, fatherhood and a move back home.
We are premiering the album in full today, October 1, ahead of its October 2 release through Argonauta Records.
It is a record that keeps changing the size of the room around you. Some parts bring to mind a long road across open prairie, guitars stretching out towards something huge and distant. A few minutes later you could be walking through a city at night, close to concrete, traffic and lit windows, with Dominik Dörfler’s low voice pulling everything back down to street level. Elsewhere the band open up enough space to suggest a near-empty motorway after dark. Then “The Exit Wound Blues” brings everything into a much smaller place: one person sitting on a bed, thinking about family, childhood and his own kid.
Heavy guitars, long quiet passages, drums that can leave plenty of air between hits and Dominik’s deep, rough-edged delivery have been part of Our Ceasing Voice’s vocabulary for years. The balance has shifted plenty since the band’s early, largely instrumental work, and “The Origin of Everything” contains several periods of that history at once.
Sebastian started Our Ceasing Voice with friends in Innsbruck in 2006.
“Our Ceasing Voice literally grew up with me. I started the band with friends when I was 19 years old and looking at pictures from when we first started in 2006, I can’t help but think: man, twenty years is a long time.”
A lyric they wrote five years into that history still hangs around:
“For what is still left / Far too much has gone / Far too much has changed.”
“We wrote that in 2011 and I guess it’s still true. We could celebrate twenty years of Our Ceasing Voice this year. But sometimes I feel like we’ve only been a real band for five or six of them. We’ve always had long breaks and in between, everything seemed to change. People changed. Our lives changed. We changed. The music changed. But whenever we did find a way back to the band, we found so much that was still the same.”
Those different versions of the band are easy enough to trace through the records. The debut EP “Steadied Stars in the Morphium Sky” leaned heavily into long instrumental passages. “When the Headline Hit Home” and “That Day Last November” followed, and by 2017 Dominik had joined on vocals for “Free Like Tonight”. His low-register rasp pushed them further towards darker alternative rock alongside the post-rock and post-metal that had already been there.
By then Sebastian had moved from Innsbruck to Munich.
“I had moved from Innsbruck to Munich and as our lives drifted in different directions, I was surprised that we made another record in 2017. We toured Europe and China and for a while we felt like a band again. But the feeling didn’t last.”
They also played across the UK during that period. Once that run ended, regular band life faded again.
Shortly before the pandemic they tried another restart and began recording a few songs for an EP.
“Then came lockdown after lockdown. We lost focus, then momentum and eventually confidence in the songs themselves.”
The sessions stopped. “Wherever You Are” and “Gasoline” were left in that pile.
“And then I became a father.”
Sebastian wrote “Diamond Eyes” sometime after his son’s birth. The first version was a piano ballad, and it sat unfinished because he could not get it where he wanted.
“It started as a piano ballad, but I never felt like I could do justice to the moment it came from. Looking back, I think I knew it needed to become an Our Ceasing Voice song.”
He moved back to Innsbruck in 2023. The band started rehearsing again, and “Diamond Eyes” came with him.
“So when I moved back to Innsbruck in 2023, I brought the wish to reconnect with the band with me. We started rehearsing again, and I showed the guys “Diamond Eyes”. Maybe that was when we knew it was time to be a band once again.”
From there they went back to what had been left behind three years earlier.
“We went back to the pile of songs we had abandoned in 2020 and found “Wherever You Are” and “Gasoline” there, only to realize that we hadn’t stopped believing in those songs at all. Dominik had written new material too, songs that immediately felt like they had something special.”
That last part is important to what the new record actually became. Dominik is not simply the person singing Sebastian’s songs. He brought his own writing into the album, and the two writers arrived at similar questions from their own directions.
“A lot of “The Origin of Everything“ is about finding yourself and finding your place in the world. To me, that’s what connects Dominik’s songs and mine.”
“The Man You Wanted Me To Be” comes at the same subject through the people around you. Sebastian has talked about the song in terms of those who shape you, help you see yourself more clearly and end up becoming part of the person you grow into.
There is a practical reason why so much of this record carries a strong individual stamp before the whole band gets involved. Our Ceasing Voice usually do not write together in the rehearsal room.
“Sometimes, I wish we were a „let’s write in the rehearsal room“-band. But most of our songs begin in solitude. Breaking out of that solitude takes courage and trust in the others, musically and personally.”
Sebastian sees the handover to the rest of the band as part of what keeps him doing this after so many years.
“There’s something special to be found in companionship through music. It can turn something personal into something bigger than your own vision of it.”
The clearest example is “The Exit Wound Blues”, which closes the album.
Sebastian wrote almost all of its lyrics during one evening on his bed. He was thinking about his family, his kid, his son’s childhood and his own.
“It’s one of the most personal songs I have ever written. I remember sitting on my bed one quiet evening and writing almost all of the lyrics in just a few hours. I barely put the pen down.”
When Dominik recorded the vocals, Sebastian heard those words coming back through someone else’s voice.
“When we recorded the vocals, we were a few lines in when I felt tears in my eyes. Dominik had taken these very personal words and put his own feelings into them. Suddenly, it no longer felt like I had written about my family, my kid, his childhood and mine. It felt like the song was written for me, and for all of us. It had become ours. And finally, after all these years, „The Origin of Everything“ now has too.”
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The album was made independently across the songwriting, recording, mixing and artwork. The current lineup is Sebastian Obermeir on guitar, Markus Rappold on drums, Dominik Dörfler on vocals and Jakob Schuierer on bass. Argonauta Records release it on CD, deluxe coloured vinyl and digitally.
There is no single writing period tying these songs together. Some survived the abandoned 2020 EP. “Diamond Eyes” arrived after Sebastian became a father. Dominik brought newer songs once rehearsals had started again. Sebastian had left Innsbruck, lived in Munich and returned before the album was finished.
That long history also reached back into our own archive. Sebastian got in touch again after going through older Our Ceasing Voice interviews on IDIOTEQ, turning up conversations with earlier versions of the band while he was already working with the current one.
Twenty years is enough time for a lot of those versions to pile up. A 19-year-old starting a band with friends in Innsbruck. The long instrumental pieces of the early years. Three full-lengths and several EPs. Dominik joining before “Free Like Tonight”. Europe, the UK and China. Another pause. An EP started and abandoned. Fatherhood. A return to Innsbruck. Three old songs getting another chance.
Sebastian’s old 2011 line still fits:
“For what is still left / Far too much has gone / Far too much has changed.”
