A New Beginning and the Return of Something Real: In Conversation with NEUSWANSTEIN

Julian van Zico: I’m actually part of the indie-rock scene. I play in various bands and have been involved in all kinds of projects since my teenage years. My main instrument is the guitar. As long as a project leans towards rock or indie, I’m really into it.

Fabian Prekrat: About two years ago, I started jamming with Stefan, a mutual friend from Peru. We were just playing guitar, trying things out, messing around. Then Julian and I happened to meet at a Christmas dinner Stefan had organized, and he brought me over to Julian’s studio. The three of us jammed together, and it immediately felt right.

Julian: Stefan is actually the hardest rocker among us, which makes it funny that he brought us together. Fabi comes more from hip-hop and electronic music, while I’m somewhere in between. You can hear that in Moving to LA: his instinct for contemporary sounds meets my endless nostalgia for Sum 41, Blink-182, post-punk and pop-punk. It comes together really nicely.

Julian: Before we started writing, we had a bunch of demos that were still pretty electronic. But at some point, we listened to a lot of reference tracks and realized: okay, no, this needs to rock. I had already sensed that. Fabi had been missing some of that guitar energy too. So it suddenly clicked.

Julian: Indie sleaze has been creeping back for a while, but right now it feels especially present. You see it in a lot of new bands. I recently came across this new Berlin duo, the Nightclubs, and they look like they’ve stepped straight out of New York in 2009. Maybe we’re drawn to that era because it was the last time the world still felt somewhat in order.

Julian: Totally. Nights just felt different then. Even the aesthetic takes me back to the Flickr days — that time right before everything became driven by algorithms. Maybe that was the last truly authentic phase of the internet. I’m sure there are a million reasons why it’s coming back. But for me, it’s also just about the look. It simply looks cool.

Fabian: For me, it’s also about the physicality of it. I started playing guitar as a teenager, then moved into electronic music and eventually hip-hop, sampling and all of that. At some point I realized I missed actually holding an instrument and recording it. Maybe not everything goes perfectly during the recording, but that’s exactly what gives it character. That’s my approach.

Julian: And that’s the last thing we still have over AI: the unpredictability of a live performance. You already hear AI-generated music that’s almost indistinguishable from other music. But if there’s a tiny mistake somewhere in a guitar take, something that isn’t perfectly quantized, that suddenly feels valuable. In a strange way, imperfection is becoming precious again.

Julian: Exactly. And a lot of people in music are already saying that everything is becoming more expensive while budgets are shrinking. AI videos will probably become normal soon. But the live moment is much harder to replace. I think that will become increasingly important.

Fabian: It came out of this very specific project. We started seriously planning to record something and put it out. The whole thing was confusing and crazy at first, but at some point we thought: okay, we’re actually going to make this. We never really sat down and said, “Now we’re a band.” It just happened.

Julian: It started with jamming and having fun. It was very idealistic: “Hey, we’re friends, let’s make something cool together.”

Fabian: Exactly. We grew purely out of fun. We didn’t have a band name, a target or a release plan. We met a few times and tried to establish a routine simply because we wanted to get better together and have fun. Only later did it become: okay, maybe we should actually release something.

Julian: I also think people often approach music in a very goal-oriented way now: “I need a hit, I need a record.” But when you’re young, you don’t think like that. You just play. Maybe the next song is a reggae track, then a ballad, then something completely different. We’re trying to keep some of that freedom.

Julian: Exactly. There are endless days where we try a thousand things in the studio and end up sticking with nothing. We don’t have a huge master plan behind it. That’s actually what I love about it.

Julian: I just think König Ludwig was crazy. My dad used to act in a play where King Ludwig was a character. Even as a kid, I found it absurd to learn about this person in school who went wild with state funds, was gay, and cared way more about art and culture than boring day-to-day state business. He had this almost extravagant, tragic existence. I’ve always found that fascinating. And of course there’s the castle — this completely over-the-top symbol of fantasy.

Fabian: I love it. We’re both from the Munich area, so there’s obviously a connection. But what I like about Neuschwanstein is that it’s almost surreal. You have this very conservative idea of Bavaria, and then suddenly there’s this completely excessive fairytale castle sitting in the landscape. That contradiction is great.

Fabian: Definitely. None of us completely fits the Bavarian cliché. I moved to Berlin, and when I tell people I’m from Bavaria, they sometimes have a very specific image in mind. Then they meet you and realize it’s not quite that simple.

Julian: Bavaria is strange because the inventive spirit is there, but it often comes through industrial channels: cars, engineering, huge companies. At the same time, there are these eccentric characters who completely contradict the stereotype. King Ludwig is probably the ultimate example. There’s something rebellious in that too.

Fabian: I studied sports, event and media management. For me, music was never a planned career path — just a hobby and a feeling. I’m still not the best guitar player or musician, but whenever I hear something, I try to figure it out. I’ve always enjoyed recording little ideas and putting them together. Eventually I thought: why not see what happens if I actually give this some time?

Julian: And now Fabi has an extremely good taste level. I’m always impressed by what he finds. I had no idea about artists like Mk.gee until he showed me. I was like: where do you find this stuff?

Julian: We have a plan. We want to make an EP and hopefully gain a few listeners along the way. But honestly, the main thing is that we enjoy making it. If it evolves naturally, great. If it doesn’t, that’s okay too.

Fabian: Over the last few months, we’ve had references and a direction we liked, but whenever we tried to push too hard toward something specific, it became too calculated. The EP will tell us where this wants to go.

Julian: I basically had the song completely done except for the bridge. The first demo already had that line, “I’m moving to LA without you,” and the first verse. I immediately thought it was a strong idea. At first, I was worried people might misunderstand the title because it can sound a bit cliché — moving to LA, chasing something bigger. But then I realized that misunderstanding was interesting in itself.

Fabian: When Götz first heard the demo, it immediately resonated with him. At the time, both he and Julian were going through heartbreak and were in a similar emotional state: you have a certain idea of your life and where it’s going, and then suddenly things don’t turn out the way you imagined. Götz continued writing the lyrics, and together we finalized the song. So Moving to LA is essentially a snapshot of how we were feeling at that particular moment in time.

Julian: My initial idea was actually to write it from the perspective of someone leaving LA and moving back to Berlin — because that was becoming a reality for some people around us. But eventually the song found its own meaning. I was sitting in the studio, just playing around, and that line came out. It wasn’t planned. That’s often the best way things happen.

Julian: For me, it needs to contain enough guitar that we can actually reproduce it live. I want it to feel electronic and indie at the same time — a bit like the way The Hellp combine those references.

Fabian: And I want to be able to DJ our music, but also play it live. We could bring in external friends and family if we want to stand onstage as a five-piece with drums and everything. But there’s also enough of an electronic backbone that we could simply DJ and plug in a guitar. That versatility is the idea.

Julian:It’s too early to define it too strictly. For us, it’s mostly about expressing emotions through music.