Girls Under Glass
Girls Under Glass is a musical group from Hamburg, Germany, founded in 1986 by Thomas Lücke, Hauke Harms, and Volker "Zaphor" Zacharias. Described as "an indispensable part of the German wave and gothic scene", GUG began as a gothic rock band, but quickly crossed genre boundaries, incorporating metal and electronic music of various kinds. They have generally been classified as a darkwave act, but have ranged across the goth–industrial "dark music" spectrum, including into industro-metal, and their work has integrated elements of pop, techno, and trip hop. Grenzwellen-News wrote of the band: "Even after 20 years, it is almost impossible to define and pin-down Girls Under Glass stylistically." A review in 2001 concluded that "even in its most experimental phases, the band has never lost its identity".
Axel Ermes joined in 1989, and Lücke left the next year, but rejoined in 2016; Harms retired in 2017. The band's lyrical material is sometimes in German, sometimes English, or a mixture of both on some tracks. Trauma, a Zaphor and Harms side project, is primarily trance with new age influences, and Traum-B produced Goa trance and psy-trance. GUG formed as a replacement for an earlier gothic–wave band, Calling Dead Red Roses, which formed in 1985, produced one album, then splintered.
1980s
Hauke Harms, Thomas Lücke, Torsten Hammann, and Roland Weers formed the gothic-wave band Calling Dead Red Roses in Hamburg in 1985, released the album 1985 on Dark Star Records, then split up before the year was out. The album was reissued on the same label in 1991.Girls Under Glass was founded in Hamburg the spring of 1986 by Thomas Lücke, Hauke Harms, and Volker Zacharias Zaphor. They gave their first live performance, in the Hamburg discothèque Kir, in May of the same year, and self-produced a demo tape, The Question - The Answer - Pop, which included early, raw versions of songs they would re-record later, including "Humus" and "Armies Walking".
The following year, Girls Under Glass released a track "Tomorrow Evening" on the compilation album Gore Night Show; this was their first vinyl release. Around this time, they also began recording their first proper album, Humus, which was produced by Christian Mevs of the band Slime, and featured a bassist credited as Dr. Fluch. Since no label was willing to produce the album, the band decided to finance it themselves. Humus was completed in 1987, and released in a limited edition of 500 on the label Supersonic Records in March 1988. It sold out, and within two months had been reissued twice. There followed concerts with The Neon Judgement, Attrition, and Fields of the Nephilim. GUG opened for Red Lorry Yellow Lorry in September 1988 at the Independent Festival in Bremen's Schlachthof. The band put out a second self-produced cassette, Girls Under Glass, that year, a collection of demos recorded at Gas-Rec Studio in February 1988 plus two live tracks; content-wise, it is their rarest release. By 1989, they were becoming well known in the German gothic-wave scene.
GUG released a 12-inch single, "Ten Million Dollars", in January 1989 the Überschall label, but it did not meet with commercial success. Live appearances during this period included two guest musicians: Marcel Zürcher, and Olaf von Ridder AKA Olaf O..
Flowers, their second full album, was recorded the same year. Regular members of the band at this time were Lücke, Zaphor, and Harms. Axel Ermes joined the band and was integrated into the full-time line-up, after working for some time with Zaphor on another project, the German cult band Cancer Barrack. Zaphor began to devote more of his time to GUG, though remained in CB as a vocalist for a while.
1990s
Flowers was released on January 15, 1990, originally on the Hamburg label Collision Records ; like the previous releases, it was conventional gothic rock in the style of The Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim. Another 12-inch, "Random ", was released in support of the album.Zaphor left Cancer Barrack to concentrated on a third GUG album, Positive, beginning a renewed relationship with Dark Star Records that was to last through GUG's 1995 releases. But vocalist Thomas Lücke left the band, and Zaphor also had to take over the singer's part. Positive was produced by Rodney Orpheus of The Cassandra Complex, beginning a long-term friendship with Zaphor and Ermes, described as "play a consistent role" in CC starting in 1990, joining that band's live lineup, and worked with Orpheus for many years, until at least 2012. Positive, released in 1991, marked the first stylistic turning point for the band, who increasingly used electronics and worked in some harder industrial rock components. The album was described by Glansost Wave-Magazin as a "hybrid between Revolting Cocks, Cassandra Complex, and The Sisters of Mercy" Project Pitchfork played their first gigs as the opening act on the tour for this album. A guitarist, Mark Wheeler, appears to have been working with the band in live shows around this era.
The fourth LP, Darius, is a multi-layered darkwave album with metal influences, but also some tracks that are almost entirely electronic; it is their most stylistically diverse album. Darius featured a new guitarist, Raj Sen Gupta, and two guest musicians: Markus Giltjes as drummer ; and Peter Heppner from Wolfsheim, who performed guest vocals on the tracks "Grey in Grey" and "Reach for the Stars". Despite the band turning toward a notably more electronic sound, Darius was their first studio work with a real drummer instead of a drum machine.
Trauma, a new age-inflected trance music side project of Zaphor and Harms formed in 1993, recorded Fractal 1 immediately after GUG's Darius, and released it that year on the Machinery Records label. Trauma expressed their "passion for cold electronic music of the 70s... combined with very new, contemporary elements", and has been compared to a cross between Tangerine Dream and Clock DVA. The impetus for splitting off a side project was Harms' shift of interest to "very spherical, cinematic music" lacking typical song structures, combined with a feeling that the band might just go all-electronic if they did not "clarify and process our electronic influences and roots even more", shunting too ethereal or experimental work into another outlet.
On Christus, in 1993, the GUG returned to the harder sound of Positive, again with Giltjes as drummer and Gupta as guitarist. For the following tour, Gupta was replaced by Robert Wilcocks, of Cobalt 60, Deine Lakaien, and Sleeping Dogs Wake who accompanied the band on tour for the next three years. Gupta may have actually left the Christus tour; accounts are conflicting.
Multiple producers, including Peter Spilles of Project Pitchfork, helped the Trauma side-project complete its second album, Construct, and an EP, Silent Mission, both in 1994 and again on the Machinery label. Spilles contributed musically as well, on the track "Le Chant de Baleine".
A Girls Under Glass EP, Down in the Park was released in 1994 also. The release shows the band experimenting with various pop and electronica influences. The EP and the 1995 release of Exitus, a 2-CD "Best of" anthology with a pointed title, signaled the end of the band's gothic and darkwave approach. Crystals & Stones, its "Die Zeit" single, then Firewalker were all characterized by an increasing admixture of pop, techno, industrial metal, and even trip hop elements.
By Crystals & Stones, GUG had condensed to a trio again, recording in the band's own new studio. Die Krupps did a remix of the track "Die Zeit", which became a club hit in Germany and was band's first CD-format single. For the tour in support of Crystals & Stones, the group employed Robert Wilcocks again, and picked up drummer Tippi Agogo. GUG played its first shows in France and Spain in 1996 with their new sound. The band's hardest-rock record, Firewalker, was recorded in 1997, and was clearly inspired by the industrial metal and electro-industrial music scene, including such bands such as Gravity Kills, KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, and Stabbing Westward. It was described as their "toughest, most aggressive and uncompromising album to date". Former KMFDM drummer Rudi Naomi joined the live lineup for the tour, with Deathline International as the opening band.
Zaphor's and Harm's Trauma project produced its third and final album, Phase III, in 1998 on the Synthetic Symphony label. Harms and Ermes formed an alternative side project the same year, Traum-B, which produced a single, self-titled Goa trance and psy-trance album, on the B.E.A.C.H. Muskiverlag label.
GUG's Equilibrium was recorded in a calmer style, a short-term return to their more gothic-wave and electro-industrial roots. As the album's name suggests, there was a re-balancing reason for the shift back, similar to that which had led to the side-project: a concern that their new-found enthusiasm for a particular style would drown out everything else, and end the diversity of their output, by having "opened a certain flow a little too far". In 2006, Zaphor reminisced: "we had more or less consciously gone into a dead end. However, this deadlock also showed us what we definitely do not want and where our true strengths lie. Girls Under Glass would have become a metal band if we'd followed the path of Firewalker and gone further.... And that's not really us."
Hauke Harms, in the same much later interview, also indicated he hadn't been happy with the over-produced quality of Firewalker and the work that led up to it, as if the songs were being suppressed, despite it being their most successful album to date:
Equilibrium was issued by Hall of Sermon records, and re-released in the United States by Van Richter Records in 2006, with three bonus tracks. The latter label the next year released the anthology Nightmares as both a CD and a digital download, a collection of singles, remixes, B-sides, and covers – many out-of-print and some not previously released, including a dance-oriented cover of the main theme of the 1978 John Carpenter horror film Halloween.
The stylistic veering in this era is thought to have suppressed the band's popularity, while having little effect on GUG's critical reception. Grenzwellen-News wrote in 2006 that Girls Under Glass was "a band which from the beginning was highly praised by critics, and not least by colleagues, but whose image and basic orientation often remained too diffuse and difficult to grasp due to the constant sharp turns."