Eine Spoon Agency & ARENA WIEN Kooperation
presented by radio FM4
5K HD live in der Arena Wien.
there is enough room for both of us
but I want all of it
are you in
are you out
The release of 5K HD‘s debut album And To In A in 2017 catapulted the band almost immediately to supergroup status. Each of the members was already well known in his or her own right; united on stage they proved to be a force of nature, celebrated at pop festivals as an atmospheric experience and at jazz festivals as virtuosic innovators. Their freedom and risk-taking as a band are practically unparalleled, as is their ability to stay perfectly balanced on diverse, constantly shifting musical terrain. 5K HD sounds futuristic, fragile, epic, brutal, playful, threatening, cinematic, distorted, light and easy, dope, badass, sensitive. 5K HD is an engaging, euphorically unsettling experiment at the border between pop and high culture. And what’s more - though it often doesn’t sound that way - they manage it all without a laptop. The backgrounds and abilities of these five musicians are so deep and varied that they are literally capable of doing whatever they want; it’s one of those rare bands where the question of what kind of music they make is pointless.
5K HD began as something unplanned; And To In A came into existence in a wild, intensive storm of creativity, without a preplanned concept. The record is a musical compendium of things that are normally mutually exclusive, or rarely appear together. The band chooses its sounds, rhythms, and perspectives from a gigantic, multilayered, contradictory spectrum, fusing the components into a precise musical language all their own, familiar but unnamable. The voice and instruments are so completely repurposed that one quickly loses track of who is creating what sound. The traditional roles of their instruments are constantly being reshuffled: the bass might play what usually comes from the keyboards; the sequences of a piano composition are redistributed among the other instruments; an electronic sound is endowed with the structure of a madrigal. Elements from minimal music, trap and opera are built into complex structures, then delivered as casually as jazz on heroin. Listeners without a musical background may not be able to put names to all the forms, references, and time signatures, but they are able to feel them very clearly indeed. The music often seems both alien and familiar, though it’s impossible to say why. Many have said they can hardly believe all of the sounds are being produced live on the stage, making 5K HD a band that also gets more interesting the closer you look.
After 1½ years of international touring, the band has begun work on its next opus. A first glimpse will arrive at the end of April with the single In, Out and the accompanying video. The song showcases 5K HD’s fascination with the enormous world of trap music - autotuned voices, ad-libs, broken and distorted sounds, and breakneck hi-hats. The band has audible fun sweeping these elements into foreign territory, in every sense. In, Out hews to a strict sound aesthetic but still manages to float effortlessly in the ether.