Colour Haze are a stoner rock 3-piece from Germany. Their music has permeated the brains of eager young rock fans around the world for over a decade now, and as any of their devoted following will gladly point out to you, there’s something more than just stoner rock going on here. Their music is a fusion of flowing psychedelic improvisations, baked-in with breathtakingly harmonious heavy grooves. Condense this opus of warm fuzz to the size of an atom and then after about 6 minutes or so unleash it with such force and infinite vigour as to leave you spinning in your swivel chair, that’s Colour Haze.Lead singer Stefan Koglek also heads up the Elektrohasch record label, which includes bands such as Causa-Sui, Hypnos 69, Rotor-R, Josiah, The Kings of Frog Island, Los Natas and My Sleeping Karma. With 8 albums already done and dusted, and another being polished to perfection at present, Colour Haze look to a future that hopefully follows on from the rich vein of critical acclaim awarded to their 2008 release All. I caught up with Mr. Koglek to discuss the label, Colour Haze, and his plans for 2010.

So Stefan, you’re the head honcho at Elektrohasch. How are you finding the balance between this and your obvious commitment to Colour Haze? Is one aspect dominating the other?
It’s difficult to say really. I mean it’s more of a whole thing in one; my life is a whole thing, it’s not really separated like that. My main focuses after of course family and friends and all those things, is my music, so that’s with Colour Haze and of course associated with that for the last number of years is my work with Electrohasch. The label is obviously my daily work when I have to make packages or e-mail with people, send outs, and various other label work stuff, you know. Otherwise I’m a bit flexible about things, I mean I still have time for rehearsals, or to sit down and play a little guitar or listen to music, so it’s all moving as one thing I’d say.

Any new up and coming bands on the label you’d recommend?
Definitely. What is very promising to me now, mainly because it’s a young band with a good development who are just releasing their second album after a very good first album, is Highway Child from Denmark.

It seems to me that All has given you allot more exposure and attention than before, has the landscape changed for you since you released that album?
Oh yeah, it has changed; you know some things have happened. I mean, in Germany we have an underground following from playing the club shows, and even if we don’t have any exposure in the media the people come. We often have people coming from very far away for our shows. We were playing a festival in Italy and two girls were hitchhiking down from Estonia, you have to imagine! Or we were playing in Vienna and two guys were coming up two days in a car from Romania to be at the show. This is a real reward to meet those people and talk with them and see that what we do is not that bad and it actually means something to the people. It’s also great encouragement because we know we have to make things better for these people, we have to play a better show, work on all the little details. It’s working for us from some sides now with the media, since All we can’t get ignored anymore. In some circles we get some attention for the music itself, because the music is maybe good and stuff and is important to the people, and of course the media don’t want to miss it. It’s a kind of tossup you know, a kind of mixed development, because for example in Germany we had those television concerts for Rockpalast, and this was actually really moving something forward for us. This was really getting us on a different level and with that we played the Burg Herzberg Festival, which is the biggest hippie festival in Europe. We had main stage with like four or five thousand people in front of the stage and it was working, so from that basis we know it does work. The more people who are talking about a band or the music, the more people know about it so it’s a good kind of mathematic curve, you know what I mean? Curving up in a positive progressive direction. Maybe this will continue which is great or maybe it stops next year and begins the downward curve, who knows. The only thing we can do about it is to try and handle it and stay open with our music and have the time for it and stick to what is the reason for all this, because allot of bands who got big sometime lost their connection to what actually was their antenna to their creativity. They lost it, they kind of got professional and knew how to write their songs like clockwork, but who the fuck cares about say, a new Rolling Stones album from the musical side you know? Those guys maybe totally lost it, they maybe totally lost it thirty years ago, and you can see from the records they were really struggling about it, where’s the creativity? Where does it come from? Ok, we need to get new influences, ok there’s disco music, I listen to disco music so we’ve got to make a disco song and things like that. Rolling Stones are a good example; they always were a bit off of the pulse of the time   but in the end I can’t blame them, they were so set apart because they became so big. What can they do – they can’t play small club shows. If there are one hundred thousand people who want to see you then you have to deliver or you’ll have to stop. Of course for us the situation is completely different but I’m just thinking what happened to all those guys. Often you see from so many bands, when maybe they make a really good first album, maybe even made a step up in the second album, and  suddenly they lost it, it’s not there anymore. I’m really thinking allot about why this happens, why was that? Why do people loose these things? Therefore I guess we’ve made the  decision now not to play the bigger venue’s or something, to stick to what is important to us, and leave out all the possible sensations about being famous or being treated nicely or whatever. You know, sometimes it’s really a hard job, it’s really a drag driving around 500-600km in your van and getting out and setting up all your amplifiers on your own then waiting, then playing the show and not earning any money, then packing it all away and going home through the night, it’s really exhausting. We do it like this because it’s not about comfort basically; it’s about creativity and art, and about giving something. If you don’t have any more to give then I hope someone will come and just say “stop it now” and “leave it”.

Just how big are you guys?
It’s really difficult to say because actually I don’t see it like this anymore. In the beginning of Colour Haze, or the 10 years we’ve had now with Mani & Phillip as Colour Haze, allot of things with our work and Elektrohasch, and how we were to go about things was discussed. How we act in the scene, helping other bands, showing encouragement and being friendly to people, there was allot of philosophical discussion and deep thinking behind it on a hard to get to level.

In order to make yourself bigger, get more exposure etc?
No No. That is exactly not what we wanted to do, exactly the opposite of what we wanted. It’s what I would call the Led Zeppelin dream; so many musicians’ minds are spoiled by it.

Led Zeppelin dream?
You know, like limousines and girls and lots of booze and all those things. Lots of money lots of business lots of bullshit! This is not what it’s about, I’m an artist and I’m caring about the art. The main basic issue for me was to make something in my life that really makes sense, and not only for me but also for others, and the problem was you know I’m not the guy who can go and be a development helper in Africa, or be in Greenpeace or something like that. The only thing I could do was to play guitar, so what do you do with playing guitar? You know, there’s so many good people around working for the betterment of the world, which is absolutely needed because there’s so many things that I’m pissed off about or I’m angry about which actually need to be changed. It’s no use standing here and crying out all my negativity about things you know, “ah this is shit”, and “I don’t like this” and “you are all stupid”. This is not the point, there is allot of good people around and you know I was thinking about what happened with rock music in the late 60’s. It definitely had an effect on things and definitely from the hippies came allot of freedom which we now have in today’s society, but nobody today is talking about this anymore. Nobody around today has a clue about how it was to be around in the 50’s or in the 40’s or 30’s; nobody has a real understanding of what those eras were like. So yeah, there are some good people around and the only good thing I could do is try to reach them. If you or anybody else could be reached and given some positive energy, or a good message I had to do it.  So how far along we’ve come or how big we are is not what I care about. I’m good just doing this. I know I’m limited with talent maybe and I’m not thinking that actually I’m the big genius. So I have to work hard at it, to try my hardest and really give something, gift some present to the world which I think is an absolutely wonderful place which needs to be taken better care of and therefore this is more like the concept we go by. You know, we are doing things underground on our own. I don’t have a big distributer and stuff but it works, you know. Over the 10 years it absolutely works for us and we have now figures of sales that allot of big bands on major labels don’t achieve anymore. I mean, only with our underground distribution and our shows and people ordering from my website, we’ve done quite well. Of course we’re nowhere near the hundred thousand or one million copies the Queens of the Stone Age sells but for what we could achieve I think it’s very good. From the financial side and from the resonance side of things it’s working allot better than if we were doing all the usual shit to get a better exposure, get into the newspapers, get a manager and all that. It’s really a big task to get onstage and tell everyone about what’s on your mind though music, and the attitude of “listen to me because I am doing this” is not the right approach. Why should people listen to you just because you’re doing it? No. You’re not so special; you’re just like everyone else. So if you get onstage you really have to give something to the people and if you manage to do this and give something to the people then people can take it and if they like it they will give you something back, this is what it’s about. I’m always a bit astounded when you meet other musicians, not so much in the scene we are in but in other, bigger scenes. The so called ‘musicians’ often don’t talk about music at all! They just talk “where have you been playing?”, “How big was that festival?” “How many records have you sold?”. They’re all talking about business; they are all fucking business men! I’m a musician, if I meet another musician I want to talk about music, you know, what influences you? What scales are you experimenting with? What is in your musicians mind? What is in your development at the moment? What occupies you in your art and not what occupies you in your wallet. This is not interesting, this is not life.

You certainly seem to possess a very unique awareness and attitude. I wish more bands would put so much thought behind their music.
Yes absolutely, that’s what we’re always going to do. This is a rule for your whole life, stick to your heart not to your mind, your mind is cheating you, you mind is agitating you and making illusions on you and you’re thinking ok, “what do I need next?”, “What do I need here?”, “I want to have this” and “I want to have that”, and you miss the time where you are at, and it’s just great where you are at. You are surrounded by nice people and you have a nice girlfriend, but you see the other women and you think “oh, the other women are so beautiful, I don’t like my girlfriend anymore” you know what I mean. So you’re put away about having a good time basically because of thinking, you’re not in your life. The thing is to be in your heart with the things that you do, do your things with Love, even if it’s stupid things, even if it’s cleaning up your flat or washing your dishes or stuff (laughs). Give this also to other people, be friendly and stuff, it’s very difficult. I’m struggling so much with it, you know. I don’t say I’m a master in it and I do it every day, I just realize when I’m not doing it and I try to change it there and then. Basically that’s the thing, and not the other things, the other sensations that blow up your head, because your head is inside you, this is not the real world.  

So album wise what are you up to?
Yeah, we’re working on a new album. We are always working on new stuff. At the moment with the new album it’s a bit of a tossup, a delicate issue, because you get those spontaneous soul themes  where you get together and develop something that really has some kind of speciality in it. I mean, like in our earlier records, tunes like ‘Love’ or ‘Tempel’ and ‘Peace Brothers and Sisters’. On the other hand we’re trying to bring the songs more to the point to arrange them more densely, also the melody lines that we have, we really need to polish them until they shine, something I think we did pretty good on the last album. So the last album All for me is a very round and complete thing, but it also has a bit missing from it. It’s not really that big an issue because All has some very good stuff on it, but from our perspective and approach it’s missing a bit of that loose easiness where you get the soul themes. So what we are going to do is leave things a bit looser with the new songs and themes and go back more to improvisation and have a more open process. We want to be open to change, rearrange and work on the songs until we really get them to the absolute right arrangement and right point. We are working to bring the new stuff that we have to perfection so the process at the moment takes a bit longer because we don’t want to be closed up in our minds. We’re working to go deeper into the details and really make it a sensual and dense arrangement. Also another development for us is that with the last album and also Tempel before, we were recording how we did it live and it wasn’t so much of a problem back them because we played nearly all of those songs live anyway. Now of course we have so many songs – you know, eight albums – so I think we now have eight hours of music composed, so allot of songs get lost for live performances. Also we are now working on stuff in rehearsal that’s only really meant to be for the album and probably will never be played live at all, so all in all it became more important for us to view an album much more as a separated piece of art to the live performances. Within this we want to deliver the songs in a perfect album version, which is maybe not so much like the live version and so I’m thinking not only to record the basic track live as we always do, but to also make decisions that benefit the album as a whole, like including the Hammond organ for instance, or maybe with strings, or extra percussion or horns or whatever. Really find the right thing and make the right arrangement for the studio and bring a song to work for the record. This is fairly new for us, we want to keep the free floating creativity, that spontaneous process we base our music on but you know, do it better than we did it before. We are still keen to make a really good album (Laughs)! I think for myself  we are not ‘there’ yet, we still want to get better, so there’s still allot to discover and learn for us, but yeah, we’re working on it.

Colour Haze play a string of dates in Austria and Germany from the 19th February onwards. For more information check out http://www.myspace.com/colourhaze

Barry O’Hara
photo: Barry O’Hara