With his solo album ONE STAR, Fabian Altstötter demonstrates how idiosyncratic pop music can be. We met him for an interview.
Not every young musician is assumed to have a soul mate with Nick Cave after their debut album. In 2019 Jungstötter’s dark piano pop earned many hymns of praise. Nevertheless, there were now phases in which Fabian Altstötter quarreled with the successor. “I was extremely insecure about the development of the album and always very torn.” He went through much more than creative crises: “A lot of things had built up in me. That ended in a very severe depression, for which I was in a clinic for a short time.”
Altstötter, now in his early thirties and living in Vienna, had to set priorities and briefly questioned the album. “When I felt better again, new songs were created,” he says. “Everything came together, which made me extremely happy.” The fact that Altstötter wrote the songs in different phases of life rubbed off on the sound atmosphere. ONE STAR is an album full of contrasts: some songs sound delicate and fragile, others sound industrial.
Altstötter is inspired by different types of music: he appreciates Harold Budd’s Ambient as much as he likes Einsturzenden Neubauten. You can hear a lot of strings, especially the double bass plays a central role alongside drums and wind instruments such as trumpet and flugelhorn. A lot seems sublime, but Altstötter also asked the ensemble for background noise.
“Anything they can do with their instruments without sounding like those instruments, we recorded it once. I’ve included a lot of that, but there are also a few samples. In ‘Nothing Is Holy’, for example, there is the feedback of a toy walkie-talkie.” Also because he was temporarily recording alone on the computer due to the pandemic, there are now more electronic elements. Noticeable are also short breaks in some songs. In retrospect, Altstötter interprets the fact that he found it difficult to endure silence in his ex-band Sizarr and sang consistently in some of the early songs as “juvenile insecurity”.
The ONE STAR aesthetic
Today he allows breaks. “This is often neglected in the current development of pop. I think that’s a shame.” After all, pauses reinforce the dynamics of music: “Stimulating something is even more intense if there’s time to take a deep breath beforehand.” The idiosyncratic and organic sound aesthetics of ONE STAR draw it into other galaxies than template-like TikTok -hit. The lyrics are also challenging: “Air” is dedicated to inner liberation, while “Burdens” is about man-made climate change. “It’s about burden, guilt and aggression. The song asks why we bring this on ourselves.”
The simple love song “My Fear Is But A Looting Game” is a contrasting program. “There is metaphorically a dialogue between heaven and earth,” he says of the lyrics. “Am I firmly anchored or am I floating above things? This is a conflict of states that I have often experienced as a struggle. The star in the album title is a fixed point that I’m heading towards more and more. It’s a pleasant feeling, the amplitudes between the mental states are getting smaller and smaller.” Highest highs and lowest lows, loud and quiet: Between these extremes, the songs sometimes develop feelings of hope. Jungstötter impressively reminds us of the transformative power of music.
The current album by Jungstötter in the stream:
This text first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 05/2023. Order here.
Text: by Philipp Kressmann