Coming from Jazz backgrounds and operating at the intersection of acoustic Experimentation, Kraut-inflected minimalism, and club culture, Köln/Berlin-based quartet Das Ende der Liebe (DEDL) have forged one of the most distinctive sonic identities in the contemporary European underground. With their first official live document, “Live at MS Stubnitz 2024,“ released via Anunaki Tabla, the band captures a continuous, 66-minute performance recorded inside the steel hull of a former GDR fishing vessel docked in Hamburg harbor.
Ahead of our upcoming review of the album, founder and editor Jacopo Vigezzi sat down with the band to discuss the acoustic challenges of performing inside a floating ship, their unique gear setup: from Nintendo Game Boys to prepared Yamaha CP70 electric grands, and the philosophy behind their uninterrupted, real-time sound creation.
“Live at MS Stubnitz 2024“ marks your first official live album, capturing an unbroken performance recorded inside a former industrial steel ship in Hamburg harbor. What made this specific night and space the right moment to commit your live sound to tape?
We’ve been recording every show on multitrack for years, so the chance was always there. But somebody has to actually sit down and listen to all of it, and the four of us have to agree that a night was really special. That alone was a hurdle. About a year ago that changed: now we mix the shows right away, upload them, listen and decide together. Out of that came a good flow with our mixing engineer Markus Daßau, who gets our shows sounding great fast. We’ve picked a few concerts that will come out over the next years, two or three a year. MS Stubnitz 2024 felt like the right place to start, because the place and the people always shape our music, and that night was just one long, great ride.
A ship’s steel hull acts very differently from a conventional club room, reflecting low frequencies and physically vibrating with every kick drum hit while water moves beneath. How did the physical feedback of the vessel influence how you sculpted bass frequencies and rhythmic dynamics in real time?
Honestly, we play on in-ears, so we don’t hear much of what it sounds like out front. What we do feel is the room vibrating and coming back through the mics. You know that feedback you get when a guitar gets close to its amp, two things starting to swing together and change the sound? Imagine that for the whole band. Live sampling and live sound and beat processing push it even further. We play into the room, the room plays back, and we let it pull us along. One long feedback loop.
The album is presented as a continuous arc divided into seven parts (MS Stubnitz Eins through Sieben). How do you maintain structural narrative, tension, and release across an hour-long set without pre-written song boundaries or traditional cues?
We started improvising together in 2010 in a band called ENJUTI, and Das Ende der Liebe grew out of that in 2014. After 16 years we pretty much play blind. We’ve played and heard a lot of arcs, sounds and melodies, and over time that turns into a kind of shared sound library. You can latch onto what someone else is doing, but you also know where it might go, so you either push it further or throw in a new color.
A lot of it is about musical gestures. Our gear changes all the time, so the sound changes too, but the gesture often stays the same. You get that without thinking and answer with a familiar move in a new sound.
We don’t really have signals. Maybe we did once. These days we just float around together and look for the moment where we all forget ourselves.
The opening 19-minute movement, ”MS Stubnitz Eins,” sets an expansive, hypnotic tone. How do you navigate the balance between patient soundscape development and building the forward-propelling drive expected from club-oriented music?
We play different music in different places. In a church with a long reverb the show gets more ambient. At Sisyphos it’s danceable and repetitive, and that’s exactly what pulls people in. Playing a festival at sunrise sounds different again. It’s free improvisation! So over the years we’ve picked up all these colors and moves, and on a “normal” club night we bring those vibes together. That’s how the shifts happen without anyone really noticing.
Capturing real-time improvisation in a highly resonant industrial space presents unique recording challenges. How did you approach the mix and master with Markus Daßau to preserve the acoustic weight of the room without sacrificing instrument clarity?
Tough one. It’s never going to sound exactly like being in the room. That’s why we also record with room mics, so some of the space makes it into the music. We’re still experimenting with what works best.
Your performance relies heavily on live sound processing, sampling, and spatial reverbs. How do you prevent dense Electronic textures from cluttering the natural acoustic resonance when playing inside metal or concrete spaces?
MS Stubnitz is a great-sounding venue. Still, the place itself obviously shapes the sound and the feeling. But the reverb and the room never caused us any problems.
Since this is your first time featured on Progressive Rock Journal, let’s trace your origins. Coming from Jazz backgrounds, what was the initial catalyst that led the four of you to blend acoustic instrument preparations with Experimental Electronic Dance Music?
We met in 2010 in the Hessian State Youth Jazz Orchestra, on a tour to China, and from then on we had a band together called ENJUTI. That was more of a classic modern jazz thing: guitar, piano, double bass and drums. We started linking the written tunes with free improvisation, and at some point the line between tune and improv just disappeared. Then we realized we wanted to play for people who dance, in rooms with more energy. Kenn and Andi were out in the club scene a lot back then, and that’s kind of how it all started. Kenn usually brought the effects along to try out, and we started playing them as instruments with their own sound, not just as a way to color the instrument you’d still hear underneath. That’s how it grew.
Your setup features a fascinating combination of vintage, acoustic, and digital gear, combining electric bass with a Nintendo Game Boy, and pairing a Yamaha CP70 electric grand piano with Ableton Live and live beat sampling. How did these specific instrument pairings come together, and how do they converse on stage?
We could talk about that for hours. Short version: each of us started changing our setup, adding to it and shaping it around the band sound. The rule is simple: everyone brings whatever they want. Then we talk about it, add something new or swap out old stuff.
Looking back at your studio milestones, such as “SCHNEE” (2022) and your collaboration “PERSIST” (2025) with su dance110, how has your approach to spontaneous composition evolved between studio projects and live documents?
In the studio we do exactly what we do live. We improvise freely and just record long takes. Nobody judges anything at that point; we’re just collecting material. Later we listen back to everything, pick out the best bits and build an album from them. We (almost) never overdub. At most we trim the “tracks” a bit, so it’s light editing. The big difference is time: in the studio a sound can grow over several days.
Das Ende der Liebe is known for performing in contrasting spaces, from Techno and Jazz clubs to bunkers, planetariums, and ships. How radically does the architecture and audience energy of a venue alter your musical choices on any given night?
The place and the crowd matter a lot. Like we said earlier, they shape everything we do.
In live settings, you often collaborate with visual artist Lucas Grey. How does real-time visual art interact with fully improvised music? Is it purely reactive, or do the visuals actively guide your structural transitions?
Yes, we love playing with Lucas. He builds his own projects in vvvv and plays them live with MIDI controllers. Sometimes he takes the kick drum and the whole live mix as input and blends it in as pulse or noise, so the music feeds straight into the visuals. But mostly Lucas is playing it all live, in the moment. Like with any improvisation, the more you play together, the more you can really talk to each other. On stage we usually don’t see any of it (apart from getting blinded). But it’s a whole different flow when you feel the room changing with what you play.
Could you share an anecdote from a past show, whether in an off-space or a traditional club, where an unexpected technical anomaly or environmental factor completely reshaped the performance?
It happens. We play on in-ears, and at our last show something went wrong with the guitar: Andreas couldn’t hear it in his monitor anymore. We tried to fix it for a minute, but it was pretty clear there wasn’t going to be any guitar that night. So Andreas spent the whole show sampling the drums, and the night went somewhere completely different. Everyone has to be up for that: grab the unexpected, turn it into something new and enjoy it.
You release your music through your own label, Anunaki Tabla, and archive your work within your digital platform, DEDL MEGAWORLD. How essential is complete artistic autonomy and self-reliance to the band’s identity?
Our label Anunaki Tabla started a few years ago, when you could suddenly release music digitally yourself. We noticed digital releases weren’t taken that seriously without a label behind them, because now anyone could do it. So we looked into it and found out running a label isn’t that much work, and it opens doors. Pretty soon we wanted to put out music by friends too. The artists keep all their rights; we see ourselves more as a platform that brings together music that would otherwise get lost as one-offs in the experimental world. We’re just happy it keeps growing. There’s no big plan; it moves at its own pace. Independence has its ups and downs. But deciding ourselves what we do, when and how, makes good decisions a lot easier, and we don’t answer to anyone.
Many modern listeners consume music in short, single-track formats. By contrast, your work demands deep immersion in long-form compositions. How do you approach the challenge of presenting extended-form soundscapes in today’s fast-paced digital landscape?
Yeah, that’s been a tough one for us for a long time. At some point we sat down and talked it through: do we try to be successful and fit the market, or do we stay true to ourselves and maybe stay underground and unheard? We chose our music over the 90-second Spotify algorithm. We’re good with that decision, so none of this really bothers us. Looking good out there, especially on social media, is still really hard. We do our best to perform in that world too. Whether it works, that’s for you to decide.
With “Live at MS Stubnitz 2024“ capturing such a distinct chapter of your live sound, where do you feel your sonic exploration is pushing you next?
We’ll find out at the next show.
“Live at MS Stubnitz 2024“ is out on December 01, 2026, via Anunaki Tabla (AT-024) on vinyl, digital formats, and streaming. Stay tuned to Progressive Rock Journal for our upcoming album review.
Purchase “Live at MS Stubniz 2024” on Bandcamp: https://dasendederliebe.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-ms-stubnitz-2024