SEK

SEK are a Berlin-based psychedelic rock trio exploring the space where improvisation, history, and heavy guitars collide. Formed in 2022 by Paul-Willy Stoyan, Georg Edert, and Lucas Kazzer, the band emerged from marathon lockdown jam sessions that gradually evolved into a distinctive musical language. Drawing on the members’ backgrounds in projects such as Elder, Gavial, Gaffa Ghandi, Jacke Schwarz, and Borders Down, SEK channel decades of collective experience into something entirely their own.

Rather than beginning with songs, SEK begin with ideas. Long-form improvisations become compositions; historical events become narrative frameworks; sound becomes a way of examining memory, conflict, and mythology. Their music moves freely between psychedelic rock, krautrock, progressive rock, and moments of crushing heaviness, embracing both hypnotic repetition and spontaneous exploration. Fuzz-drenched guitars, driving rhythm sections, expansive keyboards, and unexpected detours into drone, doom, and folk textures all coexist within a sound that resists easy categorisation.

The trio jokingly describe their music as HOR – Historian Oriented Rock. Behind the tongue-in-cheek acronym lies a serious artistic ambition: not to recreate history, but to reinterpret it through sound. Rather than treating the past as a static collection of facts, SEK approach it as a living source of stories, contradictions, and unanswered questions.

Following two self-released cassette recordings, the band now presents Wallenstein’s Garage, their first album on vinyl. Inspired by the Thirty Years’ War and centred on the historical figure of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the record blends documented history with surreal fiction, imagining the Generalissimo reflecting on the Battle of Lützen while restoring the taxidermied body of his beloved war horse, Amore Mio. The result is a concept album that is equal parts psychedelic voyage, historical meditation, and cinematic soundscape.

Rooted in Berlin’s independent underground while looking far beyond familiar genre boundaries, SEK invite listeners into a world where archival research meets amplifier worship, where improvisation becomes storytelling, and where the echoes of history continue to resonate through distorted guitars and endless repetition.

SEK will release the following record on Exile On Mainstream in October 2026: