History
Officially founded in 1992 by Nicole Rellum (voc), Ralf Jesek (voc, instr) and Kai Kampmann (bass), DERRIÈRE LE MIROIR (the bandname was inspired by Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There") are a “fixture” of the independent scene of the 1990s. Their very first demo recording “Simple Blue”, which appeared on the third part of the legendary “German Mystic Sounds” series of the German magazine "Zillo", made their soulful wave pop sustainably known and songs such as "Just Like You" or "Alibis" became true classics.
Four CDs (one of them with Astrid Reich as additional singer), concerts and several television and radio appearances followed, until problems of their label delayed the release of their fifth CD again and again. In early 2000 the label surprisingly announce their closedown and nearly the same time - and almost symbolic - all made recordings got lost in a hard disk crash. Frustrated by these occurences, a new album was postponed indefinitely and the band produced only contributions to various international compilations... until they played their farewell show on the 14th of December 2002 in Chemnitz/Germany.
photos by Nick KampmannWhile Ralf was still musically active (eg IN MY ROSARY, now I-M-R), Nicole and Kai withdrew completely from music. But at the end of 2012, when they were invited by Ralf to participate as guests in the I-M-R album “Letters from the Paper Garden”, the vague idea of going back into the studio as DERRIÈRE LE MIROIR again germinated pertinaciously. And after they had also played a little surprise show in 2013 at a birthday party, it was summarily decided to record two cover versions just for fun - and also to see whether the chemistry between them was still intact. The results (Moby's "Lift Me Up" and Valerie Dore's "The Night") were released in September 2014 as a download single. And after Ralf had finally finished the works for the release of the I-M-R album "InOutSide", they started to write new songs in April 2015.
In between Ralf and Kai recorded some songs under the moniker T-HE (the name of their project during their schooldays) and released a 3 track digital single called "Believe" in July 2016 as well as the 5 track digital EP "Worried EP" in June 2017.
In 2023 DERRIÈRE LE MIROIR entered European concert stages for the first time since 2002 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their debut album "Alibis".
