The first question of an interview is more often than not, “How are you doing?” It’s a pleasant little ice-breaker that’s started 99 per cent of conversations throughout history. However, when The Ocean leader Robin Staps sits down to talk with Prog over Zoom, we ask that opening question with more concern in our voice than usual.
In December 2022, barely four months before our chat, Staps had a near-death experience. His post-rock collective were enjoying a day off on a Puerto Rican beach during a South American tour, and the guitarist decided to finish the downtime with a sunset swim. Almost instantly, he was caught in a rip current and left powerless against the vicious waters for three hours. He’s convinced that, had the coastguard shown up just 10 minutes later than they did, he’d have drowned.
“I’ve been in rip currents before, in Australia: they’re usually very local, about 20 or 30 metres wide,” Staps tells us, now back home in Berlin without a scratch on him. “But I was in a 10km- wide bay, and this phenomenon was happening everywhere, basically. When the coastguard pulled me out of the water, they told me that it was their fourth mission that week. Two times they found the swimmer; two times they didn’t. That same week I survived, two other people died.”
All of that said though, Staps’ answer to that ice-breaker is simply, “I’m good.” The musician is surprisingly composed and clinical as he guides us through those 180 minutes he spent scrapping for his life against the sea. He matter-of-factly explains that rip currents are caused by depressions in underwater sand, and tells us about undertows: currents beneath the waves that move in the opposite direction to the surface. Then he jarringly but calmly interrupts his own physics lesson with the odd anecdote about nearly dying.
“I had a piece of driftwood that I held onto for a while, but I lost that in an undertow,” he says casually.
Staps is not an outwardly emotional person, but he admits, “I’ve always been intrigued by the sea, ever since I was a child. I went swimming in the Mediterranean a couple of weeks ago and realised that I still love it and always will.”
The guitarist was born in central Germany: Celle, the city nearest to where he grew up, is more than 100 miles inland. However, his parents owned a profitable carpet printing business in West Germany up until the 1990s, so the family often went on seaside holidays to Spain and Italy. Staps’ dad owned a fishing boat, on which he and his son occasionally sailed from Germany to Sweden, and the musician learned how to scuba dive at 15. Today, both his arms are covered in tattoos of marine life.
“Puerto Rico was actually not the first time I nearly drowned,” Staps remembers, oddly fondly. “I had a similar experience in Spain when I was eight or nine. I swam into a school of jellyfish in the Mediterranean. They weren’t the ones that hurt you really bad, but they still stung. I was panicking and swallowed a lot of water. I was with my dad and he was the one that pulled me out. He slapped me in the face because I was panicking like crazy. That memory came back to me when I was in the rip current.”
We ask how on earth Staps hasn’t become terrified of the sea, given it’s nearly killed him twice now.
“I think [philosopher] Immanuel Kant described it pretty well when he talked about das Erhabene [‘the sublime’ in German],” he replies. “It’s the experience that you have when you confront nature: there’s beauty in it, but there’s also a terrifying aspect to it. When you watch a thunderstorm, you’re intrigued by the beauty of the lightning, but you also know that it’s dangerous and could hurt you. I think that’s part of the draw for me.”
Based on that answer, it’s not a shock when Staps says he relocated to Berlin at 18 to study philosophy and geography at Humboldt University. Within a year of the move he founded The Ocean, and named the band after his lifelong muse.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1684410528/articles/zZDdGAXaA1685533223107/NShm2dl5s1685533373884.jpg]
Staps distils all of his passions into The Ocean’s music. The sextet have made concept albums themed around the sea (2013’s Pelagial is about diving deeper and deeper underwater), as well as the broader natural world: 2007’s Precambrian, 2018’s Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic and 2020’s Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic / Cenozoic are a trilogy telling the complete history of Earth. Now, on their new record Holocene, Staps writes solely about the modern age, tapping into a fascination with philosophers Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem that he acquired at uni.
“I read [Debord’s 1967 book] The Society Of The Spectacle while I was studying,” he remembers. “I revisited it 20 years later bec...
In December 2022, barely four months before our chat, Staps had a near-death experience. His post-rock collective were enjoying a day off on a Puerto Rican beach during a South American tour, and the guitarist decided to finish the downtime with a sunset swim. Almost instantly, he was caught in a rip current and left powerless against the vicious waters for three hours. He’s convinced that, had the coastguard shown up just 10 minutes later than they did, he’d have drowned.
“I’ve been in rip currents before, in Australia: they’re usually very local, about 20 or 30 metres wide,” Staps tells us, now back home in Berlin without a scratch on him. “But I was in a 10km- wide bay, and this phenomenon was happening everywhere, basically. When the coastguard pulled me out of the water, they told me that it was their fourth mission that week. Two times they found the swimmer; two times they didn’t. That same week I survived, two other people died.”
All of that said though, Staps’ answer to that ice-breaker is simply, “I’m good.” The musician is surprisingly composed and clinical as he guides us through those 180 minutes he spent scrapping for his life against the sea. He matter-of-factly explains that rip currents are caused by depressions in underwater sand, and tells us about undertows: currents beneath the waves that move in the opposite direction to the surface. Then he jarringly but calmly interrupts his own physics lesson with the odd anecdote about nearly dying.
“I had a piece of driftwood that I held onto for a while, but I lost that in an undertow,” he says casually.
Staps is not an outwardly emotional person, but he admits, “I’ve always been intrigued by the sea, ever since I was a child. I went swimming in the Mediterranean a couple of weeks ago and realised that I still love it and always will.”
The guitarist was born in central Germany: Celle, the city nearest to where he grew up, is more than 100 miles inland. However, his parents owned a profitable carpet printing business in West Germany up until the 1990s, so the family often went on seaside holidays to Spain and Italy. Staps’ dad owned a fishing boat, on which he and his son occasionally sailed from Germany to Sweden, and the musician learned how to scuba dive at 15. Today, both his arms are covered in tattoos of marine life.
“Puerto Rico was actually not the first time I nearly drowned,” Staps remembers, oddly fondly. “I had a similar experience in Spain when I was eight or nine. I swam into a school of jellyfish in the Mediterranean. They weren’t the ones that hurt you really bad, but they still stung. I was panicking and swallowed a lot of water. I was with my dad and he was the one that pulled me out. He slapped me in the face because I was panicking like crazy. That memory came back to me when I was in the rip current.”
We ask how on earth Staps hasn’t become terrified of the sea, given it’s nearly killed him twice now.
“I think [philosopher] Immanuel Kant described it pretty well when he talked about das Erhabene [‘the sublime’ in German],” he replies. “It’s the experience that you have when you confront nature: there’s beauty in it, but there’s also a terrifying aspect to it. When you watch a thunderstorm, you’re intrigued by the beauty of the lightning, but you also know that it’s dangerous and could hurt you. I think that’s part of the draw for me.”
Based on that answer, it’s not a shock when Staps says he relocated to Berlin at 18 to study philosophy and geography at Humboldt University. Within a year of the move he founded The Ocean, and named the band after his lifelong muse.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1684410528/articles/zZDdGAXaA1685533223107/NShm2dl5s1685533373884.jpg]
Staps distils all of his passions into The Ocean’s music. The sextet have made concept albums themed around the sea (2013’s Pelagial is about diving deeper and deeper underwater), as well as the broader natural world: 2007’s Precambrian, 2018’s Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic and 2020’s Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic / Cenozoic are a trilogy telling the complete history of Earth. Now, on their new record Holocene, Staps writes solely about the modern age, tapping into a fascination with philosophers Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem that he acquired at uni.
“I read [Debord’s 1967 book] The Society Of The Spectacle while I was studying,” he remembers. “I revisited it 20 years later bec...
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