As the wind is turning
All your sorrows fade away
You can let it go
We are safe now
Our modern relationship with the natural world is profoundly strange. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings learned to understand existence through the movement of stars, the changing seasons, the murmur of rivers, and the enormous silence of forests. Today, we spend much of our existence staring into illuminated rectangles, receiving an endless procession of information while remaining curiously estranged from the planet that gave us consciousness. Somewhere beneath our accumulated technologies, however, the ancient appetite for mystery survives, reminding us that the universe remains infinitely more extraordinary than anything we have managed to manufacture.
Munich-based darkwave duo Rue Oberkampf, comprising Julia de Jouy and Oliver Maier, explore this estrangement on their new album, Wehmut, released October 15th via Young and Cold Records. Across six compositions, the pair venture beyond the harder electronic arrangements that established their international reputation, introducing elements of dark folk, post-metal, and acoustic instrumentation into music increasingly concerned with the relationship between human vulnerability and the immensity of nature.
The album’s origins are themselves suggestive of an expedition into unfamiliar territory. Long walks through the Bavarian Forest and a solitary voyage aboard a container ship traversing turbulent seas helped inspire its creation. Both experiences offer opportunities to encounter the world on a scale that diminishes our everyday preoccupations, where mountains measure existence in geological epochs and oceans carry within them the accumulated history of life itself.
“Wehmut does not exist in the English language,” says the band. “It describes a feeling suspended between melancholy and nostalgia. A longing for something lost or remembered. A yearning for a beautiful place you once knew, or one you have never been to, yet somehow miss all the same.”
Its accompanying single, Darkness, makes this fascination wonderfully tangible. Acoustic guitar, performed by Josip Tijan of THYMIAN, enters Rue Oberkampf’s musical vocabulary for the first time, its earthy resonance finding companionship among spacious synthesizers and recordings gathered in the Bavarian woodland. Julia de Jouy’s voice possesses an almost celestial quality, carrying the words with extraordinary tenderness as the arrangement unfolds with the patience of a landscape slowly revealing itself at dawn.
At the center of the composition is a simple expression of solidarity: “Let the woods protect you / We will be fine / I’m here with you.” These words suggest an understanding of companionship that stretches beyond ordinary consolation, imagining the forest as a sanctuary where wounded individuals might discover the strength to endure another day.
The accompanying video, directed by Jojo and Daniel Kilgus, was filmed beside Lake Arbersee in the Bavarian Forest, with production beginning at four in the morning to capture sunlight penetrating the mist. De Jouy and Maier move through the woodland with an almost ceremonial stillness, their figures appearing and disappearing among trees and drifting fog. The lake’s dark surface, the immense surrounding forest, and the gradual arrival of daylight establish a visual meditation on our fragile place within the living world.
Watch the video for Darkness below:
Throughout Wehmut, there is a growing awareness that humanity’s oldest questions remain unanswered. What might we recover by withdrawing occasionally from our technological inventions? What forms of understanding become possible when we surrender ourselves to silence? Rue Oberkampf approach these mysteries with curiosity, allowing their electronic foundations to coexist with the physical textures of an environment immeasurably older than music itself.
Perhaps the most extraordinary revelation is how readily the natural world accommodates our private grief, offering its indifferent beauty to anyone willing to venture into its depths. Under ancient trees, beside dark waters, within the vast and patient machinery of the Earth, even our smallest acts of tenderness acquire something approaching cosmic significance.
Listen to Darkness below, and order Wehmut on Vinyl and CD here.
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