It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling when musicians you know and love release another album you know you are going to love. Zone Six is a band like that, and if you know them you know. Consisting of musical millipede and Sulatron label owner Sula Bassana, steady space rock juggernaut drummer Pablo Carneval, and new recruit Manuel Wohlrab on guitars, fans of psychedelic space rock are in for a treat.
Their sound is familiar and welcoming, but that does not mean Full Mental Jacket does not hold some surprises and psychedelic tricks up its sleeves. The three elaborate space jams go all the way from heavy fuzz gallopers, to chilled out jazzy saxophone jazz jams, and much in between. With everything that is going on you’ll forget that there aren’t even any vocals on the album. The power of the riff will compel you, and these jams will roll over your face endlessly, like sticking your head in a bunch of spinning car wash rollers.
Full Mental Jacket is an album to get lost into, its pulling power lies in the merciless repetition and layeredness. You will partake in many journeys, and each will feel slightly different from the previous. So enjoy the trip, as you will, again, and again…
Diverting a little bit from the usual, we decided it would be interesting to talk to a different member than our revered and beloved Sula Bassana, who we talked to many times over the lifespan of this weirdo blog. Luckily, newfound Zone Six guitarist Manuel Wohlrab was more than happy to assist. He already spent a small lifetime in the German music underground and jumped to the occasion to tell us about his biggest passions.
Hi guys! How is Zone Six doing at the moment? What was the last thing you did that made you guys happy?
Hey there! We’re doing fine and everybody is husteling his way regularly through the actual times in the place he lives: Vienna, Tübingen and/or the middle of Nowhere in North Hessen… : – D At least Dave now is also very busy with his other „projects“, mainly the Sula Bassana band. Bernie is becoming a neuro scientist and I work as a teacher in school which is also pretty engrossing.
But we’re very happy that finally our new album Full Mental Jacket is coming out on October 6th and we can play some more shows this year. And we’re looking forward for what’s coming next year!
Can you introduce the current line up?
So Dave aka Sula Bassana is the very core of the band as he started it in 1997 and „leads“ it until now. He already played nearly every instrument in this band (bass, drums, guitar synths), Bernie (Electric Moon) has been the drummer for many years now. And I slipped into the steady lineup last year as the actual only guitar player after playing two shows with the old lineup before.
We jammed and recorded the basic tracks in early March 2022 nearly directly after Putin invaded the Ukraine. I guess this dark and angry mood formed the new sound of this Zone Six-record. I’m still a little excited and tensed as I’m also coming out of a more Metal and heavy music background which makes the guitar sound different than every other Zone Six-output. Of course we feel very well with the result. And fans are pretty used to its everlasting evolution I guess but still a change of the musical style might always be a big deal – at least I witnessed this as fan of many other evolving bands. But until now we had a good experience. And we’re curious where the journey takes us next time!
What is your musical background? What is your earliest music memory?
So the first favourite song ever I remember is „I Can’t Dance“ from Genesis. It was on a „Best Of 1991“-CD my parents owned and I listened on repeat as a very small child and „sang“ and „performed“ it a lot.
Because I was really into watching wrestling in the age of 10/11, I stumbled upon Metallica as the wrestler Sting used to have their song „Seek And Destroy“ as his entrance theme. So it also was on the „WCW Mayhem – The Music“-sampler I bought in 99 and I guess that was the start of getting into harder guitar-driven music. Maiden, Manowar, Slayer were easy bands to discover. VIVA 2 introduced me to a lot of Thrash and Death Metal bands every Sunday night in the early 2000s. And Grunge of course was also a thing there. I guess it’s a pretty typical way to get into this music for my generation: Music television…
I think these genres also got me into „the groove“. The most important bands were: Anthrax, Exodus, Unleashed, Amon Amarth, Six Feet Under, Sepultura, Pantera, Down, Black Sabbath, Black Label Society, Corrosion Of Confrmity. A beer drinking metal kid living in a small village in the center of Germany – pretty nowhere… I also learned to play guitar and together with some friends I played some covers in a friends rehearsal room. With a Behringer V-AMP2- Hahaha! Oh man…
In 2006 we formed our first band: Route Irish, named after the street from the airport to the secured Green Zone in Baghdad, known as „the most dangerous street in the world“; we wanted to be some kind of poltical and chose this as a symbol of our back then times: the war on terror. We thought it was very deep, haha!
Also in 2006 I’ve been to Wacken and saw Celtic Frost. That was a turning point in my musical view of the world: They were so slow and therefore heavier than every Death and Thrash Metal-band I’ve listened to before and also seen on that festival. Mindblowing! And what a cool performance it was! Still gives me goosebumps when I watch it on Youtube today.
In the times around graduation from high school and the begin of university I finally met a bunch of people who were really into the same kind of music as me and knew how to play instruments. And now (round 2007) the internet, Myspace and Youtube were a thing and discovering music was even easier. When I started studying and moved to the small university city of Marburg, I really got into Stoner Rock, Doom, Psychedelic Rock and Post Rock. Even saw Truckfighters there in a small bar in 2007 – with two guitar players; yeah! Also Route Irish got more influences of Stoner Rock additional to the Groove/Thrash Metal. But it (unofficially) disbanded around 2012 after releasing one really shitty produced album because all my bandmates weren’t as involved as a band that wants to play some shows somewhere else than in a 50km radius rock bar (which can be fine of course…) needed. But it was totally ok. Since 2009 I also took part in some private jam sessions with a lotta new friends I made. So this is where the passion for jamming began.
Visiting many great festivals – Stoned From The Underground, Roadburn, the then upcoming Freak Valley Festival – of course also made an impact into my musical sensation. More „modern sounds“ and more and more „Blackened“ stuff took over the focus of my musical taste and creativity: YOB, Thou, Neurosis, Isis, Cult Of Luna, Pelican, Wolves In The Throne Room and so on… Fortunately my good friend Jussi founded the Post Metal band Amber (he wrote nearly all the songs; a beast of songwriting!) and I became part of the lineup for gigs lateron. With this band we really got around. But unfortunately the band „collided“ a lot with the first vocalist after 2 years and the following up vocalist quit the band out of nowhere – after being not that reliable the months before – with a short note 2 days before we wanted to record the third album. So we decided to restart and renamed the band Yanos – like the second face of Amber. And with this band we still play live and a new album will come out next year!
Then there was the founding of „Tunes From The Void“ but I guess I’ll come to that in the next question. Just want to mention here that music blogs (with illegal downloads…) like Sludge Swamp, Stonerobixxx or – the best – Bunalti were the doorway to endless albums for me back then… In 2013 I also started jamming regularly every week with 1 or 2 friends – later even up to 5 – in another rehearsal room in Marburg. Out of this grew „The Marburg Stoner Collective“, a fun jam project that even played live a lot later on. So this is maybe the direct root to Zone Six as Dave played with us a couple of times in Marburg as well. This project was just for fun and „nomen erat omen“… ; – ) We smoked a lot and played everything from funky Kraut over good old pentatonic Sabbath-Rock and melodic Psych to Doom and Post Rockish stuff. The conclusion of nearly every musical experience I made until then. But I guess this project is also done as most people – including me – don’t live in Marburg anymore and it wasn’t that „serious“ at all. But a great school in musicianship for me and some others…During the last years I mostly got into Prog and Fusion rock, but also back to a lotta Metal.
So yeah sorry, now this answer escalated heavily but I had a very driven musical journey and it took a big part of my life…
Where do you live, and/or which place you lived had the deepest impact on your music?
Actually I live in the beautiful small city of Tübingen 40km South West of Stuttgart. Moved here for becoming a teacher; now in „special needs education“.
But the city that made the biggest impact on my musical life was without doubt Marburg, beginning with the many new like-minded people I finally met after being the freak in a small village for many years. There I saw some great bands in the „KFZ“ like Brant Bjork, Karma To Burn, the „Up In Smoke“ Vol. II and Vol. III road festivals, Red Fang. It nourished my neverending craving for more „abroad-sending“ music. And Frankfurt and Wiesbaden weren’t also that far so I could attend even more shows.
But the main thing about Marburg was that it had a very good infrastructure for D.I.Y. culture. In 2012 I took a step back from studying and started to create a 2 hours radio show every month on „Radio Unerhört Marburg“: TUNES FROM THE VOID. This was probably the biggest step in my musical life. There also met some of my deepest friends originally connected by music: Paul (Plasma, musician and visual artist) and Adrian (nowadays in the Sula Bassana band; but also in business with Melting Eye with his wife Kristina). From there I expanded and started setting up shows in the „Cafe Trauma“, an open but – if you want – very professional venue. The conditions were so perfect: The Trauma had a really great PA and kitchen. It got some money from the city and the state of Hessen so we could pay the bands a good fee but didn’t need to falter when not enough people showed up. The place where I lived back then had enough space and great roomies who shared their dorms to host the bands privately. And with Paul Plasma (https://www.instagram.com/paul_plasma) and another friend (Caro) I had two promising artists who made some really great posters for the shows. Also the Yanos-rehearsal room was just next to the venue so that we could manage backline service pretty easy, even last minute. The whole infrastructure and my friends support made it possible to set up shows as a nearly one man-booking-venture: I booked the bands, coordinated the poster motives with the artists out of the lineups, ordered the poster prints online and brought them to the walls of the city, sometimes pushed flyers into the hands of unsuspecting students round the campus dining hall, cared about some people for the bar and entrance, cooked dinner, entertained the bands backstage and at home and sometimes even brought some nearly braindead musicians into bed… And Adrian set up some really great visuals with his liquid projectors!
It really meant a lot to me. And it was the biggest privilege to book many great bands I saw somewhere else and wanted to show them to the people in Marburg (for example Toner Low or Mother Engine) or listened to online and probably would have never seen them live otherwise (for example Soldat Hans, Weedpecker or Carpet).
Through Tunes From The Void I got into contact with many many bands, festival promoters and music freaks all over the world. And with some of them I’m still friends, like Dave and Bernie (hahaha), Nick DiSalvo or Vinnum Sabbathi – especially the Tamayos. There are so many down to earth people in these heavy psyched out music scenes and I’m glad we met. So thank you, „Fortuna“, Marburg, Radio Unerhört and Café Trauma!
What does jamming mean to you? How did you learn to do it?
So jamming is something magical to me. Where does inspiration come from and how does it – in best case… – spread amongst the musicians taking part in the session? Sometimes it’s pretty mystical! Especially when you try to make a change of the key note and everybody changes the same way and it all fits together! But of course it happens to not work out that well and you need to react quickly, hahaha! So jamming is the hardest but also most abundant kind of making music together!
Though we always wrote songs out of jams placed around home-„written“ riffs in Route Irish, I learned to fully jam in the late 2000s by just letting go into simple Sabbath-like Sludge and Stoner/Doom-riffs with some friends. For the Post Metal-band I got more and more effect pedals and so the jams got more „psychedelic“ and diverse over the years. The dope made them more repetitive and longer…
The biggest school of jamming was The Marburg Stoner Collective. Not only I jammed with many different musicians (the core Collective counted 12 different people who got on stage with me a couple of times; of course not all at once) in different styles, but also we went on stage with improvised music in front of an audience. I basically used the Collective as a cheap and fitting support band for some of the concerts I hosted with Tunes From The Void when there was no other fitting band around… Haha!
But it was often a lot of pressure as I’m very perfectionist and barely satisfied with myself, so often I didn’t have much fun on stage. I really WORKED there! But the recordings afterwards often turned out satisfying and so at least I could enjoy them…
I learned to chill out more on stage and „let less be more“ over the years. But as we barely play with Zone Six and this band is more professional than TMSC, I‘m sometimes pretty tensed again when going on stage to be honest. But when the fun starts the critical brain fades… So I’m also glad we use some song basics as a framework and then get more and more into jamming at our concerts until we reach the free flow.
But maybe I need some musicians around Tübingen to let go from time to time!?
In your opinion, who are some contemporary giants when it comes to jamming?
For me this will be totally Motorpsycho! It’s always exciting to attend a concert of them as they play a very different, long setlist every night. And they like to jam in their mostly brilliant (many albums…) songs and attach them together or medley them up. They are outstanding musicians and blow me away when they jam.
I generally think that jammed music is something that mostly works live as you need to see and feel the energy. It’s hard to ban that on a record. But it’s possible and there are some good ones out there! So I barely listen to jam music at home to be honest. But when I do, I prefer some more forward-driven jams. The Cosmic Dead, Kanaan, Acid Rooster, Kombynat Robotron or Speck are some bands that come to my mind this moment who deliver some compelling jams. And of course Earthless might be seen as a jamming giant with less – but only high quality – output than the pure improvising bands…
How are psychedelic music and psychedelic drugs related in your view?
Maybe that’s a question about „hen and egg“? And of course it’s not that easy to define „psychedelic“ though it’s a word overwhelmingly often used to describe music… Especially as it’s a very subjective feeling/experience for each single person.
I’d say the mantric repetition, hit by unforseeable interspersions here and there are the elements in music that make it „psychedelic“ to me. The use of some sound-altering effects mostly help to shape the interspersions into different spectrums of frequencies that – somehow – hit your brain and perception… „differently“.
And psychedelic drugs can make your brain recipient for the driving and abroad-sending aspect of monotony as well as the impact of the interspersions. So I guess that makes the interdependence of psychedelic music and drugs to me.
But the thing is, that it of course also works out without drugs and one – if one’s into the combination – should never forget to attend a show sober from time to time to appreciate your pure mental reception of psychedelic music. I think the danger of using psychedelic drugs with psychedelic music is on one hand that you might slide into some kind of „mental dullness“ – haha, maybe that’s what you want – that doesn’t make a difference which band you’re actually listening to or on the other hand „overthinking“ everything too much so that you can’t enjoy the simple things in life. Both happened to me at least once…
And then nowadays in the late capitalism and age of memes, pretention and shallowness an industry – like in every subculture – has evolved around the feeling behind this mixture of drugs and music and all the aesthetics surrounding it that kind of pretends this whole complex in publicity for the sake of money… Of course influencing is something basic in culture and most of the stuff that was made 10 to 20 years ago was already influenced by the 60s/70s and all the stuff that comes along with it. But I think this whole industrialization and therefore standardization of „drugs&music“ (also i HipHop) makes a lot of new music mediocre and boring to me. Tell me the 1636th time about that witch in the woods with drugs and/or the sexist view of a woman that wants to smoke with you and then… No, please not! But yeah, also this is a subjective thing and people who get into this music and maybe drug-related context will find their own way… But fuck capitalism!
Back to topic: I still like the combination of psychedelic music and drugs… : – D
What are you looking forward to most this year?
First playing with Yanos as support for the great Astrosaur in Marburg on October 7th, then playing some shows with Zone Six in Czech Republic and Slovenia in the end of October and beginning of November. Hopefully I can catch Swans in Bochum in November, too. And after a big load of work in December I look forward to hopefully find some rest and peace in the end of the year… Maybe play some Baldur’s Gate III.
What should the Weirdo Shrine readers do immediately after reading this interview?
Listen to Ice Dragon on bandcamp (favourite albums: „The Burl, The Earth, The Aether“, „A Beacon On The Barrow“, „Dream Dragon“ and „Seeds From A Dying Garden“)!!! Most underrated heavy psyched out band ever!!!!! And then – if you like it – please go on their nerves and force them to make new music and play a European tour by writing many emails to them, haha!
Weirdo Shrine 