Les Rabiates & Artur Becker “The dead man in the cemetery goes home”
The band Les Rabiates (aka Swim Two Birds) and Artur Becker can now look back on an eventful past – numerous live performances in Germany and Poland since 2007 and the successful CD production “A Kiosk with Eleven Million Nights” from 2009.
After a ceasefire, the musicians (Achim Gätjen, Ralf Benesch and Jens Ahlers) are returning with their enfant terrible, the German-Polish poet, with their current CD The Dead Man in the Cemetery Goes Home being a kind of back-to-the-roots journey: The recordings for this album were made in 2006 – at the junction between Swim Two Birds and the later Les Rabiates, and if you like, they document the first meeting with the writer, poet and essayist Artur Becker.
Also involved in these recordings are bassist Willehad Grafenhorst (bass balalaika, double bass), guitarist Tammo Lüers and trumpeter Michael Gross, all of whom are long-standing and great musicians from Swim Two Birds. This album was produced in autumn 2006, around three years before Ein Kiosk mit elf Millionen Nachten. It contains 11 unpublished recordings from the wilder times! We don’t want to withhold these rarities from you and have reworked the album for your and our pleasure.
And anyone who doesn’t know Rabiaten and Becker yet can rely on the verdict of the Stuttgarter Zeitung, which wrote after a concert in the famous jazz club Bix: “What a whirlwind of words and notes! Artur Becker tells of Coney Island, of Baudelaire, of Rudolf combing his hair, of uprooting and longing, of the whirlwind of language: a beatnik from the east of Europe.”