Sofa Surfers
Mixture of rock and electronic music floating between trip-hop, dub and acid jazz chillout music.
Founded in 1996 by Wolfgang Frisch, Michael Holzgruber, Markus Kienzl, and Wolfgang Schögl, the band began its career with the soundtrack for the cyberpunk movie Wirehead (directed by Norbert Pfaffenbichler and Timo Novotny). The close-knit interweaving of audio and visual has remained a central precept ever since. Filmmaker/visualist Timo Novotny and singer/performer Mani Obeya joined the Sofa Surfers in 2005, adding additional drive to the self-titled album that continues to elate crowds all over on their innumerable international tours.
The Sofa Surfer’s discography shows a clear and continuous style development. The band loves to risk it, recreating their concept and modus operandi time and time again, a fact that makes it a tough call to put them in a box. The Sofa Surfers have long since freed up from the usual straitjackets of the music scene, creating not only several remarkable albums, but also music for film and theater, solo albums, and musical collaborations for a variety of art pieces and performances. However, peering closely at their more than five studio albums will reveal a coherent ensemble of highly musical style fusions lurking in pop culture’s dark outer fringes.
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The band continues down the path of obliterating the pop cultural borders between terms like “Black Music”, “Dub Culture”, or “White Rock”. But the songs are denser, the lyrics more explicit than ever before. Their latest album Blindside (2010) is an expressive creation that absorbs soul and noise, only to reflect it back, demanding physical listening (head banging, jumping, screaming) from the audience. The album captures the dynamic of a Sofa Surfer concert, creating a textual and acoustic representation of our modern society, of increasingly uncertain identities, of a societal skepticism of rushing from crisis to crisis…
