anstam: stones & woods

Stones and Woods is the second album from Lars Stöwe aka Anstam. "I started to miss the feelings I had when I made music as a kind of an isolated self-experiment. So, I decided to get that back and I started with the Anstam debut album Dispel Dances (50 004CD/LP). I started an expedition to search for that euphoric state of mind that I had in 1997 and I was searching for it in Anstam. All the things Anstam could be already flashed up in Dispel Dances but this album was about going inevitably towards the big unknown, with all the good or evil it could bring. Stones and Woods is not about searching anymore, it is about observing. It is about being there. Deep in the heart of Anstam. Standing there and adapting to all the Anstam mannerisms. It is about becoming a part of it. The whole dynamic of Stones and Woods is about self-contained cycles. A day. A year. Who knows? But there is always a beginning and an end. Every one of the nine songs is completely worked out, a solitary significant document. I've structured Stones and Woods like an '80s pop album. Not too many songs -- but every song tells his own story. There are dance songs, sentimental songs, challenging songs, the whole circus. And it's much more fragile than Dispel Dances. That album was full of pride and very adamant in its own rigorousness. I guess Stones and Woods is much more open to the idea of being introverted, emotional and sensitive. That makes Anstam much more complete now and offers more soft spots to connect with. But of course, it is still an experimental album. Like all the other Anstam material, it has a fundamental progressive approach and it definitely gives no easy answers, but it is approachable and it has that kind of elegance that brings life to cold, dead data information and turns it into something self-evident like stones and woods." --Lars Stöwe (aka Anstam)

Anstam "Stones and Woods" (50WEAPONSCD/LP10) - Out on October 26, 2012