Anderes Holz: The waldzither

It’s 2015. In an old cabin in the fields and crow-bushes of East-Westphalia on the outskirts of the Ruhrgebiet. Against the background of a dropout freak culture thrives an unbound borderless and limitless dynamic, a band baptized in festival mud scratched by unrestrained rawness. Anderes Holz burn for their hippie-punk breathed progressive folk rock. For that they use an instrumentarium reduced to the essentials, vocals, bass, drums and waldzither.

The waldzither (German: forest zither) is a plucked string instrument from Germany that came up around 1900 in Thuringia. It is a type of cittern that has nine steel strings in five courses. Different types of waldzither come in different tunings, which are generally open tunings as usual in citterns. The most common type has the tuning C3*G3 G3*C4 C4*E4 E4*G4 G4. Waldzither is the nearly forgotten instrument of the German Scout Movement Wandervogelbewegung outlawed in World War II, a venerable lady of 100 years, rescued for the present tense.

Shot through dozens of modulation effects a choir of hypnotical beauty and dissonance arises. The progressive avant-garde folk rock trio allow themselves sound- and show-escapades, they tell epics of lepers and sing small hymns for the hopeful. The debut album Fermate, released by STF Records in 2018, is a synthesis of German poetry, Russian avantgarde artwork and American antistream production. This is the soundtrack of the bankruptcy of a, by her very nature, permaculture world.

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