If you didn’t know what you were listening to or what era it came from, you might mistake Forming Haze for the futuristic product of an AI: chanting over post-punk melodic mantras, between minimal pop, dystopian soundtrack and a strangely glowing intimacy. But then you read the story behind The Crippled Flower – a band from Düsseldorf, Germany, that in 1985 seemed to know more than many others. Who felt the swan song of their era before the last note faded away.
The songs, now collected for the first time, seem like a “back to the future” moment: a futuristic parallel world from the 1980s that sounds like tomorrow today. Somewhere between Wire, Felt and Kraftwerk – the latter brought in by English singer Phil Elston, whose lyrics oscillate between environmental destruction and time travel. What remains is a static energy that never fully dissipates. Four individualists – Phil Elston, Stefan Krausen, Nina Ahlers and Stefan Schneider – on a quest, connected by a brief spark in the Düsseldorf record shop Heartbeat, by demo tapes and four-track sketches that seem to have fallen out of time. Forming Haze is a journey through dimensions: melancholic, sharply contoured and full of strange warmth. A lost band that never imposed itself – and maybe that’s why it sounds more relevant today than ever.
