STILL PARADE shares new single ‘As Long As, taken from his second album ‘Soon Enough’ due 9th November via Feel Flows

Smart songwriting, inventive production... a dreamy, soft, shimmering sound” - The Guardian

“...pop dissonance tied in with a lofty and galactic feel.” - Stereogum

“As crisp as an April morning and packed full of unseasonable warmth” - DIY

Berlin’s Still Parade – aka Niklas Kramer – shares the second single from his upcoming albumSoon Enough. New track ‘As Long As‘ is driven by a melancholic melody and harks back to the sounds of the late 60s and covers heart-warming territory with this love song.

A reoccurring line in David Lynch’s confounding TV show, Twin Peaks, meditates on the notion that “We live inside a dream.” It’s a line that can be interpreted in a multitude of ways but what it definitely does do, is ask us to consider what exactly reality is. On Soon Enough, Kramer is the dreamer who dared to dream. Across the albums nine tracks, Kramer shares his own particular reality, collecting together a series of his very own life events and observations and instilling them with meaning, and in the process creating his own reality within the album’s dreamy landscape.

Work on Soon Enough began in earnest back in late 2016 after the release of the debut Still Parade album, Concrete Vision. After beginning the writing process in his home studio in Berlin, Kramer decided a change of scenery was needed and in early 2017 he took the bare bones tracks he had started, across the Atlantic, trading Berlin for a creative vacation in Los Angeles.

“I stayed in a red room in the reddest place in Silverlake, close to Koreatown,” says Kramer. “Everything was red in this apartment, the floors were red, the walls were red, the sofas were red. The guy I was renting from had all these German vinyl records on the wall, so the first thing I saw after a 15 hour flight from Berlin, were these Stereo Total and Andreas Dorau records. That whole place was like this amazing low budget Twin Peaks set.”

Lionel Williams, the mastermind behind celestial pop outfit Vinyl Williams, would be Kramer’s LA guru and chief collaborator for the trip, having previously directed the 360 video for the Still Parade track “Chamber,”. At the time, Williams was camped out at Non Plus Ultra, a not-for-profit DIY creative space frequented by the likes of Mac DeMarco and Jimmy Whispers, that lifts its name from a Latin phrase that roughly translates as, “a high point with nothing beyond.” There Lionel would lay down the drum tracks that would form the foundation of Soon Enoughand begin to give shape to the sketches Kramer had brought with him.

Under LA’s clear skies, Kramer achieved a new found clarity about the direction the album should take. Every evening he took an hour and half walk around town. “I was really stunned by all the colours in the sunset. Coming from the gray of Berlin Winter and ending up in this colourful world, it just blows your mind. The title track on the album, “Soon Enough”, tries to capture an ephemeral moment, like a beautiful sunset, that you know is going to slip away. It’s not meant to be a whole metaphor for life or anything, but that’s one of the general vibes on the record, trying to hold on,” Kramer explains.

On Kramer’s last day in LA, he and Williams headed out into the desert on a pilgrimage toJoshua Tree and then 20 miles beyond, to the Integratron sound bath in the Mojave Desert. The Integratron energy machine sits on a “powerful geomagnetic vortex” on an “intersection of powerful geomagnetic forces.” Allegedly the structure is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. The wooden dome was designed to be an electrostatic generator for the purpose of rejuvenation and time travel. Basically it channels good vibrations or as Kramer puts it, “it’s weird, basically you lie there on the floor and the sound waves try to mess with you. I don’t know what it is about the desert but it puts you in a certain state of mind, it changes your whole perspective on things. Especially having spent so much time in the confines of a small studio room, this was like the opposite, there’s too much room. You get crazy and lost out there.”

Returning to Berlin was a crash landing back to reality for Kramer who says, “Everything seemed so clear in LA. Then I had to put the this dreamy record through a reality check.” It would be another full year before Soon Enough was finished, a year that involved Kramer relenting to the idea that getting stuck is sometimes part of the creative process. Kramer took a second creative vacation, this one taking the form of time out from work on Soon Enough, Kramer began working on a separate batch of previously unreleased Still Parade songs that would form 2017’sKindness EP, as well as cultivating a project of experimental ambient sounds under the moniker N Kramer.

Refreshed, Kramer returned his focus to finishing Soon Enough, the self-produced album he had been nurturing for the past two years that’s now being released on his very own label, Feel Flows (named after Kramer’s favourite Beach Boys track). Soon Enough is an all together softer record than it’s bold, primary colour predecessor, Concrete Vision, that also aims for more emotional complexity while trying not to drift into what Kramer calls “emotional jazz” territory. Selecting instruments more like a colour pallette, in order to cultivate more sixties sound, Kramer avoided the polysynths used throughout his Stil Parade debut, instead employing sounds like Clavinet, Rocksichord and Farfisa. The result is an album instilled with California sunshine and flooded with the warm red you find right before sunset. Soon Enough might be dreamy by design but is now very much a reality.

Soon Enough Artwork:




Soon Enough Tracklist: