Die Aeronauten Say Goodbye with Nine Extra Lives
The wave of grief that went through the whole of the Swiss music scene when Olifr Maurmann aka Guz died after a long illness in February was extraordinary. With the posthumously completed album “Neun Extraleben”, the remaining members of his band, Die Aeronauten, have delivered a truly wonderful epitaph to a great musician and friend.
Rarely will a member of a band who, by Guz’s own account, “were never big anywhere, only everywhere a bit”, have enjoyed such enormous personal respect, popularity and affection. There can’t have been a single music fanzine or, indeed, serious daily newspaper, that didn’t celebrate his life with an extensive, lovingly compiled obituary.
At the time of Guz’s untimely death – he was only 52 years old – his band, Die Aeronauten were in the middle of completing their eleventh studio album. With lockdown further deepening their sense of grief, the remaining five band members decided that they would best serve the memory of their friend as well as a band history going back thirty years by completing the album. This, they did, with the aid of producer and musician David Langhard aka Howlong Wolf.
“Neun Extraleben” does what Aeronauten do best: it delivers a raucous mixture of garage rock, Morricone romanticism, rhythm & blues brass à la the Saints, and wit. Cover versions of Bernie Turner & the Armorettes’ “Ching Ching Wong”, “Goldfish Murder” by Billy Childish and Sexton Ming, and Henry Purcell’s “Lament” complete the sense of a gloriously wild ensemble sparkling with ideas until the very end.
“Neun Extraleben” was released on 20 November 2020 by Hamburg-based Tapete Records.
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