Happy release day, Florian Ostertag!
4 tracks on 4 track. Florian Ostertag – one of the most talented songwriters in the country – has dedicated himself to a new project: writing, arranging and recording songs under the dogma of using only four tracks. Everything is reduced to the essentials and the song is at the center. So the Stuttgart native withdrew with a few instruments, effects units and the 4-track tape deck to a remote location in the Swabian Alb.
Florian Ostertag likes to take his time. The celebrated debut “The Constant Search”, released in 2009, was followed by concerts and festivals, radio and TV appearances and at least the EP “The Maria Sessions”. The second album “Flo And The Machine” was a long time coming and was finally released on February 28, 2020 – and not even two weeks later almost the entire world was in pandemic standstill. Timing has always been special with Flo…. In the lockdown, the songwriter worked on new tracks and the first four now appear on the EP “4 Tracks on 4 Track”. The result is four songs that deal with failure in its various facets, and show why Florian Ostertag has helped shape the German music landscape for over 10 years now – whether with two highly acclaimed albums, as a permanent band member with Philipp Poisel or Lena Meyer-Landrut, as a producer and film composer, on stage with William Fitzsimmons, Boy or Joris, or during appearances on TV Noir or the SWR3 late-night show. Always accompanied by his smorgasbord of partly antiquarian instruments, Ostertag touches his audience with beautiful melodies in harmonically rounded, but also creatively playful and wacky songs. With a blend of perfection, instrumental inventiveness and his mischievous nonchalance, he expresses life through his music as he experiences it: intense, benevolent and with various ups and downs, always authentic, insightful and captivating.
The opener “All Under Control” is a driving, atmospheric indie-folk song that describes the tireless search for the fulfillment of partly indefinable longings. In “Keeping It Vague,” the narrator sadly and soberingly realizes that all the many life goals once set were never realized – accompanied by soft vocals and melancholic folk-picking guitar. Slightly sarcastic, “Give Up” comes creeping around the corner. The sing-along chorus, however, also sets up for liberation, throwing overboard the pressure of thinking that anything can be achieved after all with enough faith and perseverance. In the fourth track “Holy Rain” rolls a lo-fi drum machine and the song tells the story of an American celebrity pastor who had fallen into disgrace because he had cheated on his wife and is subsequently released by his church. This thought takes the singer-songwriter as a starting point to the question of whether we can free ourselves from our guilt by taking responsibility.
“4 Tracks on 4 Track” will be released on March 17, 2023 and will be presented on tour through Germany:
15.03. – Köln – Kulturkirche Ost
17.03. – Bielefeld – Bunker Ulmenwall
18.03. – Lüneburg – Spätcafé Im Glockenhof
19.03. – Bremen – Zollkantine
24.03. – Schwäbisch-Hall – Anlagencafé (mit Gregor McEwan)
25.03. – Lindau – Zeughaus (mit Gregor McEwan)
26.03. – München – Milla Club (mit Gregor McEwan)
06.04. – Reutlingen – Kulturzentrum franz.K Reutlingen
14.04. – Chemnitz – Weltecho