‘Night Wobble’ is the sixth long-player from Saarbrücken, Germany duo Pretty Lightning and their second instrumental record following 2022’s ‘Dust Moves’. Due for release February 21st 2025 on Fuzz Club, it’s a set of downtempo, repetitive grooves that course through dusty spaghetti-western psychedelia, Tuareg-derived desert-blues, library music and '70s progressive. It’s always cinematic but shot through with trippy, off-kilter moments that bring a sense of alien to the widescreen panoramas here – this is an “oozy, woozy cowboy groove”, as they put it. If it was David Lynch who directed ‘Paris, Texas’ then Ry Cooder’s soundtrack might have sounded something like this.
“With our previous and first fully instrumental album ‘Dust Moves’ we actually thought we’d only be only taking a little detour from our ‘Fuzz/Rock Duo’ path to explore slightly more experimental ideas”, Sebastian Haas (guitars/keys) and Christian Berghoff (drums/percussion) recall: “But as things came together surprisingly easy and the whole process of making the record just felt very fluid and effortless, we somehow came to appreciate making exclusively instrumental music more and more. It was like a door opening up to a new exciting territory, which we happily embraced. These kinds of tunes just hit a special spot and never bore us at all, quite the contrary, it´s rather inspiring.”
Though ‘Dust Moves’ was both a musical and thematic excavation of the desert, its follow-up ‘Night Wobble’ wades through less arid surroundings: “Night Wobble can be perceived as the soundtrack accompanying an imaginary story of a journey into the forest after dark, conjuring all the arcane images and strange magic that can happen in the woods at night. The rhythm serves as a proposal for the pace in which one roams through the night, but it’s the moments of idle that invite you to hang out and have a deeper look around.”
