Witchfucker changed their name to Coltaine!

Karlsruhe, Germany based six-piece doom/black/sludge metal collective Witchfucker has decided to change the name to Coltaine.

Witchfucker (now Coltaine) rose from the depths of the black forest in summer 2014. Combining a vast range of styles and instrumental arrangements, the band creates their own rather dark rock sound, without being limited by boundaries in creative development. They released 5 albums without a label since 2014, all the recordings were done by the band.

Coltaine is:
Julia Frasch – Vocals
Sebastian Aumann – Vocals
Michelle Langner – Drums
Moritz Berg – Guitar
Benedikt Berg – Bass
Stephan Schimassek – Saxophone

Coltaine’s latest album »Bäd Vibez Önly – Aufarbeitung einer Krise« (“Bäd Vibez Önly – dealing with a crisis”) was released on August 13th, 2021.

Recorded at Soundtown Studios, Karlsruhe Blankenloch.
Mixed and mastered by Jonas Weiss.
Cover art by Ramona Borowiak.

It was a tough year for the band members and they described the whole creative process as it follows:

“After we finished the recordings for »Afterhour In Walhalla«, in January, we were hyped and more than ready to take it to the stage. 2020 was supposed to be the year! We came right out of the New Years hangover with a weekend tour in France. One of the gigs, the one in Metz was cancelled, because there was trouble between the venue and the Mayor of Metz. Everyone was really cool about it, we received food, a part of our payment and went drinking with the friendly hosts. There was a final gig on Valentine’s Day in our home town, Karlsruhe, right before the Covid-Hammer dropped and the states were locked.

At first we laid low and focused on getting »Afterhour In Walhalla« out, meaning we chose the cover, did some fine tuning, got it mastered by a good friend and took care that everything got captured on Vinyl. When we finally had the finished LPs in our hands it was October, and there was no end in sight to the restrictions in public in private life. The album title began to seem a bit ironic.

Since our part time jobs, we chose to have more time for music, did not fill the void of lacking concerts, the one’s we would have played or visited, we saw no other option than to get back to it. Easier said than done.

Jule, who was the lead singer on »Afterhour«, had begun her studies in Mannheim and couldn’t attend the band gatherings regularly for now. Also we had found out that a big investor was buying out most of the buildings in town which are providing rehearsal rooms. So we had struggle finding a new one, after we had difficulties in our last one. Our good friend Fred, who also did additional percussions on »Afterhour«, took us in, and offered us to stay in his Rock ‘n’ Roll bands room, until we would find something.

It was a small room. Especially, since our long time friend Schnitzel had joined the band as vocalist and Iva, who had showed a great set of pipes during a spontaneous jam at Schnitzel and Moe’s birthday party in late summer, was also coming with us. On the 20-something square meters, we were packed like sardines in the can, but we were thankful as fuck!

First we tried it with another drummer, our close friend Peter, who hadn’t played in years but didn’t seem as if he had forgotten anything. In this time we experimented a lot, Shelly (our drummer) was playing second guitar and Steve got his Theremin out, next to his Sax and his transverse flute. We began mixing up styles pretty wildly, rapping, chanting shamanic choirs and all that shit.

Well, the thing with the two guitars didn’t work out. So Peter had to leave the drums for Shelly to continue.

But there were still all this restrictions, in terms of number of people who were allowed to meet and they got even tighter, with people being prohibited from leaving their house between 8pm to 5am. So we were left with no choice, in good old rock ‘n’ roll tradition, we had to break the law. For the next six months we met up two times every week at the room, eight o’clock sharp, and stayed till dawn to creep home, zombie like, with the first beams of light. With running noses, in the cold winter mornings.

The Jams kept piling up and the mixture of styles might have become even more out of control. But since there was still no sign of opportunity for even a single concert coming up, we didn’t know where to with all of this. When we were up to about 20 odd ideas, that were more or less finished, we put our foot down and said: “Alright, that’s it! ‘JAM VERBOT’!” (No more jamming!). We got all the equipment necessary to record the next album mostly by ourselves. But as mentioned, the room wasn’t exactly giving us much space for a proper recording session. So Fred was helping us out once again.

Saving our asses once more, he let us record, as the first ones, in his new founded studio, Soundtown Studios in Karlsruhe-Blankenloch. One can not over state how much that guy lives and advocates rock’n’roll. So we packed all our equipment in Moe’s age old Volks’ Caddy, boiled the amount of tracks down to 16 or 17 and left for Soundtown.

It was March by now but the wheater shitty as it had been all winter long. So we unloaded quickly and began to set up for a weekend of action. When Jonas, the one in charge of recording and mastering, arrived, he first asked Schnitzel where Jule was. We forgot to inform him about the change in constellation. Around midnight, everything was plugged and the sound was checked. The recording session could start. As we did with all the releases before, we went on doing it live. That first night we got down five or six songs. One of Fred’s friends who wanted to help us to set up our gear, was too late for our enthusiasm and instead made it his mission to circle between us serving us all kinds of refreshments on a silver plate. It went on till five or six in the morning.

When we rose the next day, with a head as big as Buckingham Palace, we didn’t take this as an excuse and recorded the next four songs within the first two hours of our day (which started admittedly fucking late).

»Gewürm«, »Cräcking Bonez«, »Dunkel« and »Sexy«, each didn’t take more than one to three takes. For the latter Shelly even borrowed her red hippy dress to Schnitzel, for him to get in the right mood to sing that particular song. The Feeling resembled pretty much the vibe we had in those overnight lockdown sessions.

Some ideas we had worked out by now, some were still rough and for the grater part improvisational. For example with “Balkan Vikings« we had just these cool riffs, but had no particular plan for the song. In the end we did this song in one take as a total improvisation.

We had completed almost every idea we had around 2 or 3 am and sat down on the couch wasted as shit. Completely busted we began fooling around on two acoustic guitars and a bit of percussion on with the last two pieces we hadn’t recorded yet. It was raining cats and dogs outside and we didn’t even realise that Jonas had began setting up two overheads, with some poor peoples engineering and a bag of tobacco to hold them in place. That way we recorded »Living On Speed« and »On The Road«.

We ended up with an album that reflected the long days of lockdown, winter, creeping around in the darkness and not know what was to come. It had differed a lot from the albums up till now, but it was an honest attempt to catch the hell we went through this last one and a half years.

For the cover we chose an artwork by another close friend and artist, Ramona Agata Borowiak. The picture showing two dead squirrels seemingly in a fight for live and death, one hanging from a rope and one laying down, had caused a lot of headlines and public outrage in southern Germany. The story was in news papers and discussed over radio broadcasts and the internet all over the place. “Art student kills animals for crude installation!”. When she was seen taking the pictures in the local park, the people thought she had killed those animals, which wasn’t true of course. This image holds more than just controversy for us, since one member of the local music scene, didn’t make it through this dark fall and winter period.

In the aftermath of these recordings we decided to separate ways with Iva, due to problems in communication.

»Bäd Vibez Önly – Aufarbeitung einer Krise« is a diverse piece of art that stands more than anything for the circumstances of the time in which we came up with the songs. It is drenched in drama, expectation, despite and a good drop of hope in a bucket full of steaming shit.

Through the lack of gigs we already mentioned in the beginning it wasn’t possible to create a physical release, but time will tell, maybe there will be a time for this too…”

Bojan Bidovc // music enthusiast, promoter, misanthrop and sometimes a journalist as well