Swatka City has been built up intensively over the past few years. The young Songwriter David Nydegger has an arsenal of songs and an idiosyncratic idea of how the material is to be realised. In 2008, Swatka City was founded and in the musicians Jonas Enkerli, Kaspar Hochuli and brother Matthias Nydegger he found the ideal line-up to record the arrangements as well as perform live. In 2009 the debut EP was released under an own label while in and around Bern the name Swatka City went around. David Nydegger also created the band’s debut video clip to accompany the piece “Off Your Beaten Tracks”.This spread through the Internet and notice was taken.
Already in the early days of the band, they were driven to perform abroad: Swatka City already has two tours in Eastern Europe behind them (2009 and 2010), and gigs in Germany, Austria and Istanbul have also made the concert book. In 2010 they also won the prestigious Gurten festival’s competition and appeared on the Forest stage. The jury’s conclusion: “They were the discovery of our contest (…). There are not many young bands with such an extent of elegantly powerful song writing.”
And further highlights were to follow: Successful director Dani Levy was made aware of their music and had the band contribute the song “Run, Run, Run” to his film “Das Leben ist zu lang". The film was shown in cinemas nationwide across Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2010.
In the second half of 2011 Swatka City recorded and produced their first LP.Marco Jeger and Martin Ruch from Weltschall (references: e.g. Bonaparte, Tele) stood at their side during the recording, mixing and mastering. Recording was done in their own studio, in churches or in the Weltschall studio in Berlin. The resulting “Nighthawks” (kuenschtli.ch/Irascible) sounds virtuous and mature and comes out in March 2012.
“Nighthawks” combines all the strengths of the young band and takes the path followed earlier further. The album contains twelve carefully arranged and exquisitely produced song pearls. Sophisticated rock music meets fine electronica. The Bernese men know exactly what they are doing and rousingly perform the songs with authenticity. This is pop at its best. The songs ignite upon first hearing and take on more complexity with each listening. Vocal passages, scraps of text, and guitars’ arching melodies implant themselves firmly in the ear canal and stay there pleasantly long. On the one hand it becomes apparent that the band has an enormous sense for unconventional rhythmic structures that drive the songs forward; and on the other that they can get out anything of themselves anytime – whereby a surprise can always be counted on. The first single, “Somewhere Along The Line” is the perfect sightseeing program for the first day in Swatka City.
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