Photo: Matthew Hendershot.
Orgov are a four-piece stoner-doom band from Leipzig, Germany. They released their self-titled debut album independently on October 17, 2026, but the name shared by the band and the record comes from a place far from their rehearsal room. Guitarist Sascha Ronneburger had visited a radio-optical telescope near the Armenian village of Orgov, and brought his memories of the site back into the band’s search for a name.
The telescope stands at the Aragats Scientific Center, on the slopes of Mount Aragats. Built during the Soviet period, the instrument known as ROT-54/2.6 combines a 54-meter radio antenna with a 2.6-meter optical telescope. The huge dish and the control rooms Sascha encountered made the scientific ambitions of the place tangible to him, even as the buildings seemed deserted. That sense of discovery became part of how the musicians understood their new name.
The album gives that connection a further, audible form. Its closing instrumental, also called “Orgov,” incorporates sounds recorded at the telescope, although the composition itself began more than a decade earlier. Guitarist and vocalist Franz Uhlig, bassist Nikita Antonov, and drummer John-Fabrice “Johnny” Jahn join Sascha in the exchange below, tracing how an old song and a visit to Armenia eventually met on the same record.
Doomnation Radio: Sascha, what do you remember most clearly from your visit to the Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope, and how did that experience enter the band’s conversations about its name?
Sascha: What I remember most is the awe I felt in my chest when I realized what kind of place we were in. I went there with my girlfriend Sophie and Hauke from Berlin, a fellow traveler we met during our trip through Armenia. He invited us to join his search for lost places in Armenia and suggested we meet in the town of Orgov. Sophie and I barely looked into it and simply trusted Hauke. He spoke fluent Russian, which helped us get onto the grounds of the former Soviet-run ROT-54/2.6 at all and buy our way past the “security guards.” It felt forbidden as we walked down the barren path toward something we didn’t actually know the nature of.
The moment we saw the enormous satellite dish, our hearts leapt with excitement and the thrill of discovery. The whole site and its many buildings seemed desolate and abandoned, yet secrets hung in the air. I was also impressed by the large hall with its remarkably well-preserved control room and the architecture typical of that era. Behind every room, traces of the past awaited us, and you could vividly imagine the astrophysicists’ thirst for knowledge back then.
Back in Germany, our band’s story was set to continue and we were still looking for a drummer as a rather nameless band. When Johnny joined in 2024, we finally needed a good name. Everyone threw three names into the pot, we voted on them and explained how we had come up with them.
Sophie had once mentioned that “Orgov” would be a good name for a band, so I tried my luck. Lo and behold: the guys loved the name and its associations. Space, promising, abandoned, desolate, mysterious, vast and adventurous. That inspired us musically, too.
Ever since, we’ve been called Orgov.
Yasmin Rai is credited on the album for recordings she made at the telescope. These are field recordings: sounds captured on location, which Nikita incorporated into “Orgov.” They brought the actual place into a piece of music carrying its name.
DR: How did you choose which of Yasmin Rai’s recordings from the telescope to use in “Orgov”? Could you describe one sound and what you did with it?
Nikita: I came across an Instagram post by Yasmin about recording the sound samples in Orgov when I googled “Orgov” to see how far down I’d have to scroll to find our band (quite far back then). The song was already recorded, and originally we’d just planned to drown everything in reverb and delay in the quiet passages to create atmosphere. But actual sound samples from the place that gave the song its name sounded more exciting, so I reached out to Yasmin.
She had already organized and edited the sounds very well, so I didn’t need to edit much. Just choosing the sounds, arrange them and add a little reverb.
I tried to arrange them in a way that would support the build-ups, choosing sounds that support a sense of mystery, tension, perhaps a little danger, too.
There are so many cool sounds there, hisses, clanks, all kinds of ambient sounds, but what I love the most is the recording of two artists Yasmin knows, singing to each other over that huge telescope. It sounds distant, a little noisy, eerie. And it just happened to fit the song’s key perfectly.
DR: What changed in the closing track between its earliest version and the finished recording?
Franz: “Orgov”, the closing track, is actually one of the oldest songs on the album. I originally wrote it more than a decade ago for one of my former bands, but we never managed to fully finish or rehearse it, so it basically sat around for years.
That made it all the more exciting when I played it to the guys and they immediately said they wanted to do it. Surprisingly, the finished version is still quite close to that original idea. A few things changed, though. Originally there were some smaller synth parts planned, which we dropped completely because they didn’t really fit our current line-up. We also removed several double-bass passages.
The biggest change happened in the quiet middle section. In the original version, that part felt much colder and more detached. During the pre-production phase, Sascha and I developed a new melodic line there that gave the section much more emotion and drama. That really changed the character of the song for me.
Nikita also added previous mentioned field recordings by Yasmin Rai, which gave the track another layer of atmosphere and eventually created this really nice connection to our band name.
Franz also writes the band’s lyrics. “Mushrooms,” the album’s opening song, gives fungi a speaking voice and imagines how human beings might look from their perspective.
DR: In “Mushrooms”, the fungi speak for themselves. What did writing from that perspective allow you to do?
Franz: Mushrooms are some of the most fascinating organisms on this planet to us. They can be beautiful, delicious, mind-altering or literally deadly. Beneath the surface, they form enormous networks, and although they are such a fundamental part of life on Earth, they can still feel strangely alien to us.
That contradiction was really the starting point for the lyrics. We wanted to build a bridge between the human perspective and the world of fungi by letting the mushrooms speak for themselves. There is still so much about these organisms that feels mysterious to us. Even things like slime molds finding their way through mazes seem almost unbelievable. But if you write from their perspective, you can play with the idea that none of these things are mysteries to them. We are the ones who don’t understand.
That is also where the line “We seem like aliens, cause you don’t understand” comes from. From their point of view, they are not strange at all. They have been here for an incredibly long time, living beneath our feet, breaking down dead matter, creating new life and forming an essential part of the ecosystem.
So giving them a voice allowed us to reverse the perspective a little. Instead of humans looking at mushrooms as these weird, mysterious organisms, the mushrooms are looking back at us and saying: we’ve always been here. You just haven’t really been paying attention.
The following song, “In Our Hands,” turns that question of understanding toward humanity itself. Its lyrics begin with a claim to superiority, then ask what remains of it when people stop questioning what they believe.
DR: “In Our Hands” begins by calling humanity the “crown of creation” and later withdraws that claim. What led you to build the lyric around that reversal?
Franz: The reversal came from the contradiction we see in modern progress. A lot of technological developments seem incredibly positive at first. Smartphones are probably the best example: in theory, we now carry almost the entire collected knowledge of humanity in our hands. That sounds like something that should make us wiser, more curious and better informed.
But having access to information is not the same as understanding it. Sometimes it feels like knowledge has actually become more fleeting. We look something up, consume it for a few seconds and immediately move on to the next thing. There is an endless sea of information, but that does not necessarily mean that we engage with things more deeply, remember more, or really reflect on what we are consuming.
That is why the lyric starts with “We are the crown of creation” and gradually takes that statement apart. Humanity likes to define itself through consciousness, reason and imagination, but the song asks what those qualities are worth if we stop doubting, questioning and thinking for ourselves. That is really what the line “Without doubting, what will remain?” is about.
The title “In Our Hands” also has a double meaning. We literally hold all this knowledge in our hands through our phones, but at the same time it is in our hands what we do with it.
And we are definitely not looking at this from the outside. I notice it in myself as well. I can waste an absurd amount of time doomscrolling, to the point that I recently banned my phone from the bedroom. So the song is not really an accusation against other people. It is just as much a criticism of ourselves and a question of whether what we call progress always makes our lives better.
DR: How did you decide that the title track should close the album?
Franz: Interestingly, we didn’t originally know that the song would be called “Orgov”. Its working title was simply “Doom”, because we always knew we wanted it to feel massive. To us, it’s probably the most unconventional song on the record and at some point it felt fitting (and maybe slightly cheeky) to make this strange, sprawling final track the title track of the album.
Johnny: To be honest, it was the “final track” before it was the “title track”. I think this decision felt very natural since it’s the only pure instrumental song and also the longest track on the album. We wanted to end the album with a journey in itself and we also liked the idea that the song ends relatively abruptly. Ideally, after listening to the album, you’ll sit in silence for a few moments processing what you’ve just heard.
The band recorded the album in March and April 2026 at Wellrounded Hoodlum Studios in Leipzig, with Matthew Hendershot sharing production duties with the musicians. The sessions brought their prepared material into a room where arrangements and sounds could still change.
DR: What changed in one of the songs when you brought it into the studio? Could you take us through a decision that came out of working on it together?
Johnny: Actually, less than you might think. We went into the Studio with a pretty solid plan and demos that were relatively well-produced. For a few songs, we ended up recording some percussion elements on the spot and here and there, we made minor changes to the lyrics to improve the pronunciation. But all in all, the album turned out pretty much as we’d imagined it.
Nikita: We really dove deep into tone shaping and sound design, which is especially noticeable on the song “Through the Window.” Before we went into the studio, a lot of it was still left to chance, sound-wise. In the studio, with the help of studio owner and producer Matthew Hendershot, we really took the time to choose the right instruments for each part, build spacey delays for different parts, fine-tune them, and even had a somewhat spontaneous session with all kinds of percussion that was available in the studio. All that really brought the song to life.
The two singers in Rai’s recording happened to be in the right key for a piece Franz had written years earlier. That coincidence gives the band’s name a precise connection to the record: people singing at the telescope became part of the song that closes their debut. The place Sascha remembered from a visit could now be heard in music the four of them had made together.
Orgov’s self-titled debut album is available to stream and buy on Bandcamp.
