Dehli 9, the album's title, is confusing for a start - as it has nothing to do with New Delhi, the Indian capital, but a piece of Tosca's biographical history. Dehli 9, was the name of Richard Dorfmeister's and Rupert Huber's former band.
Founded long before Rupert Huber started his studies at the Viennese Institute for Electroacoustic Composition and Richard Dorfmeister began his globetrotting career as one half of Kruder & Dorfmeister. During their years in school together, Dehli 9 was the laboratory in which Dorfmeister and Huber took their first musical steps, explored simple electronic equipment, and enjoyed their earliest, hippiesque live appearances in a quarry near Vienna. In Dehli 9, Richard played guitar, flute and keyboards and Rupert played keyboards and a saz, a turkish string instrument.
For Dehli 9, Dorfmeister and Huber recaptured the spontaneity of their earliest collaborations. Their direct but freeform approach is quiet obvious. The sounds are drawn less from well-sorted sample banks or refined VST plug-ins, but from a range of live instruments that Richard and Rupert played during the two-year long sessions. After recording, the music was arranged on the computer, leaving room for some formidable vocal contributions. Anna Clementi, who also sung on the Tosca album Suzuki, lends her voice to "Oscar", "Me And Yoko Ono" and "Rolf Royce". The polymorphic hipster Earl Zinger, a.k.a. Rob Gallagher from London, sings on "Wonderful". "Gute Laune" is sung by MC Tweed of Birmingham's Different Drummer Sound System, "Every Day Every Night" is hushed by Viennese super MC Sugar B. and "Rolf Royce" features a contribution from the legendary Viennese New Wave vocalist Graf Hadik.
Dorfmeister and Huber's signature repetition of themes and musical ideas is not to be found on Dehli 9. For their new album, they allowed their emotions to take the lead rather than working from compositional concepts or high-minded ideas. Consequently, one shouldn't pay too much attention to the titles of the tracks, they have more a symbolic character and illustrate feelings, not overt messages. "For example, we came up with the title Dave Dudley as it reminded us of truck driving", Rupert Huber says. Dehli 9 is a "sonic photo book" in which musical and emotional snapshots of Dorfmeister and Huber's lives are the driving force behind the music.