Für Dich
…as commented by Jörg
»Für Dich« was the first song on which Thommy and I worked together with our late singer Pete. It serves as a sort of fundament of our work. But more than that it is our way to say farewell to and remember Pete, who sadly passed away some in 201X.
As mentioned before both »The Sisters Of Mercy« and »The Mission« had a huge impact on me. For »Für Dich« I adapted the idea of the intro of »The Mission’s« iconic song »Tower Of Stregth.« It begins with percussions and the drums coming in later. Normally I prefer English lyrics for my music, because British bands being the only idols of my youth. But in this case I’m still overwhelmed by Pete’s German words and vocals.
…as commented by Mirco (mixer and occasional sound-designer of the album)
It was indeed a strange feeling to set up the mix for »Für Dich«, the only track left from a previous incarnation of HDR with now deceased singer Pete. In fact I’d never mixed a track before with a voice that can’t be listened to anymore. By destiny or design I’d never got the chance to get to know Pete, so his voice feels mythologically a testament for the previously uninitiated as I saw myself at that moment when I first listened to the rough mix prepared by Jörg.
Musically I found a great deal of Jörg’s signature sounds with the inclusion of sitar sounds and a variety of hand-held percussions, a passion he’d already shared by the time when we made the soundtrack for previous band Room 101. As with »Mother«, it was a sort of taking up the thread once again, bridging the two decade hiatus sonically. And again it’s the density of the overall sound that makes this track one of my favourites when it comes to designing the sound, placing the instruments within the aural panorama and pathing the way the final mix had to march upon to the listener’s enjoying ear.
Here is a perfect moment to mention and praise Thommy’s genuine guitar playing. While the industrial rhythm of the track seems to invite some heavily compressed guitars, he works the track in unexpected ways by not filling the sound with pretentious stacato. Instead he uses his talent for spicing and refining the feel of the song with modulated strings that sparked my imagination for some extraodinary ideas now audible in the mix: Some stems were cloned and sonically manipulated through an oscillator of my good old Roland System 100M and subtly fed back into the mix. Listen carefully to the short guitar-solo to encounter some sonic surprises and hidden depths.
As Laibach is Rammstein for grown-ups (as they said in an interview), HDR seems to be Rammstein for the playful, even though it makes little sense to juxtapose these bands here. In fact I still have the feeling that the great pop element within this track is more at the fore than the supposedly industrial rock. And it’s a great manifest for the Roland R-70 drum machine again of which only Jörg is capable of programming it the HDR way.