In the "Krone" interview

Dritte Hand: Mostviertel dialect fantasies

Dialect dialect music with a penchant for the fantastic: Dritte Hand around Mario Schlager and Bernhard Scheiblauer (center).

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Medienmanufaktur, Julian von Urban)

Dritte Hand celebrate dialect music made in Mostviertel on their new album "Olle Viecha, olle Fisch". On it, folkloristic, experimental and sometimes jazzy approaches are mixed with literary-fantastic lyrics. A feast for all those who enjoy dreamy songs with sophistication.

Dialect music without any weird, political stench and bland pomp has always worked quite well in Austria, and even better in the present day. Sometimes you just have to dig a little deeper to find these gems and make them accessible for yourself. The Mostviertel region is currently doing particularly well in this segment. After a brilliant second album by the Gravögl, local band Dritte Hand - who now live in Vienna - set another exclamation mark in the field of musical dialectics with "Olle Viecha, olle Fisch". Musically, however, there is a different shift. With Dritte Hand, there is less Neil Young and more jazz borrowings, classical folklore and a love of experimentation. In addition, frontman and lyricist Mario Schlager likes to disappear into highly personal mind games when writing lyrics, which an outsider cannot decipher without an accompanying solution booklet.

Tearing down walls with sound
The animalistic elements in the album and song titles of "Olle Viecha, olle Fisch" are largely metaphorical. For example in "Biber, Biber", one of the key songs on the album, in which Schlager refers to William Blake's poem "The Tyger". "Blake depicts the tiger as a dangerous and voracious animal - I liked the comparison with the much smaller beaver," he explains in the "Krone" interview, "in this case the beaver stands for my former loves and it's about how you often let them stop you in life because they build a dam behind you. You then have to tear it down in order to move forward." Dritte Hand are tearing down walls with their sound and leaning out even further than in the past.

The single "Beograd" began as a bossa nova piece and developed into completely different spheres. "Dicht" also has a completely new esprit in terms of sound, and "Wind" even starts the song with noisy noise set pieces. "This is a post-apocalyptic story where the world is destroyed by an immense wind." Schlager's creative cosmos circles between literary inspirations, stories he has experienced and crude fantasy constructs. This makes Dritte Hand's songs both accessible and unwieldy, which is a special feature in the local music landscape. In the song "Uewan Kraupeag wird ois finsta", the singer lyrics together a mixture of the stories from "Noah's Ark" and "The Whale" and combines them into a classic headpiece à la Dritte Hand. "When it comes to creativity, I'm always happy when cross-connections open up by chance."

Production tour de force
Not only are the stories told adventurous, the production phase was also adventurous. As the individual band members work in different industries and fields, the recording sessions at Stress Studios in Graz were compressed into four days. On the way there, Schlager's VW Caddy gave up the ghost and producer Wolfgang Möstl caught a severe cold and fever. "The story of our recording is an apocalypse in itself," laughs keyboardist Bernhard Scheiblauer, who founded the band with Schlager a few years ago, "I even considered calling the album 'Es wird schon ois schiefgehen', but the others rightly objected that it would have been far too much about the pitfalls of recording and far too little about the album itself." Incidentally, the repair costs for the car would have amounted to 3,000 euros, which was too much for Schlager. "We then drove back to Vienna in a rental car."

To support the production of the album, Dritte Hand repeatedly relied creatively on crowdfunding measures and showed more commitment than many of their competitors would. For example, an existing song was reworked with new lyrics for Valentine's Day for exactly 14.02 euros and sold exclusively to one person. The wealth of ideas knows no bounds at Bandcamp. "We are a very procrastinating collective. We like to keep ourselves busy with things so we don't have to work properly, which is why there were so many different rewards in our crowdfunding system." The many jobs and side projects also meant that five years passed between the previous album and "Olle Viecha, olle Fisch". "Some songs came extremely quickly, others took us years to write," Schlager sums up, "everything just happens as it flows out of us."

Space in between
However, Dritte Hand's work does not follow a concept. "You write concepts together to make it easier to get funding from the music fund," laughs the frontman, "in fact, overall it's mainly about memories. It's as if I were painting a picture or had taken photos at a certain time, which I then refer back to. Every song inevitably has to do with memories and relationships. But it doesn't always have to be about a person or love, it also looks at all the facets in between." In the spaces in between, the sound of Dritte Hand leaves enough room to discover things or perhaps even find yourself in one story or another. The Mostviertel is increasingly developing into Austria's musical and rural California.

Three summer live dates
Dritte Hand can be seen live a few more times in the near future. On June 18, they will be playing with Green Colored Sun at Vienna's Kramladen, on June 22 they can be seen at the Alter Schlachthof in Wels and on August 17 as part of the "Hin & Weg" theater festival in Litschau, Lower Austria. At www.drittehand.com you will find all further information regarding tickets, timing etc. for the individual events.