Blind Ego
Biography Blind Ego
Kalle Wallner
Wallner’s solo project returns with a new album entitled Liquid and displays a more versatile performance than ever. Seven years have run down the road since Liquid’s predecessor Numb, and guess what the exceptionally gifted guitarist of RPWL chose to do? He throws himself into the high waters of rock music! Powerfully the songs fall over the listeners’ heads, relentlessly they swirl the audience around – just to culminate in carrying them gently on a wave of fascination.
Liquid – that is the term that Kalle Wallner has chosen to put on his latest work as a name. And there is hardly a different take that is better suited to describe the different flows and streams that push these nine songs forward. One can feel the unforgiving force of mighty waves while, only moments later, the melodic intensity of the music evokes that comforting feeling that we have all felt before when floating in the delicate surf: hovering, elegant yet exciting and, yes, stirring. Everybody knows: “Water is life”, and yet the rapid power of destruction is inherent in the wet element. That also makes a good analogy for the schizophrenic nature of Kalle Wallner’s new record. At times Liquid appears to be pitch black, aggressive and heavy, while in different moments the music exudes a sense of crystal clearness and cleansing freshness. Starting with the first second, Liquid pulses elegantly and radiates the powerful intensity of the purest form of life. At the same time, though, the record allows the listeners to feel the violent anger of the artist.
Kalle Wallner took seven years to complete his third solo effort. While 2007’s debut Mirror sounded smooth and almost melancholic, the Freising-native Bavarian utilized the figurative steam hammer on 2009’s Numb and served the audience with a tough as nails monster of hard rock heavily influenced by metal. Liquid now fuses the two earlier approaches without merely being a thrown together sum of its parts. In fact the elements were organically merged – and the result contains nine pieces of music that offer everything: from mighty hard rock melodies to brutal heavy metal riffing action all the way to emotionally charged passages. By means of those tools, Liquid ultimately completes a comprehensive artistic process that saw its beginning years ago. In the center of all this there is Kalle Wallner’s both virtuoso as well as effective style of guitar playing that unifies all the energy streams in one collective soul.
On Liquid, more than ever, Kalle Wallner steers towards a definitive goal in a most determined manner, without allowing conventionality to use up too much space. Just like the programmatic fluid, the mastermind makes his way in places where maybe there wasn’t even one in the beginning of the process. That way Wallner does not only advance into unprecedented dimensions musically and combine the proven with the ambitious, but also succeeds in refining the musical framework with the roiling character of the thematic content that showcases the artist’s very personal and yet universally articulated world of emotions in the most varied facets.
