Astalla Bici is like an on-again, off-again relationship. We keep coming back, forgetting the grind and pain of inserting your rod into places you shouldn’t, using tools that are just wrong for the job, chasing an epiphany that may never come, before the inevitable descent into desperation. The sweet smell of failure, the soothing voice of hope, yet another frame that beckons around the corner: rare, rusty, regal. Beautiful, impossible to pass up.

We are a DIY bike garage in Munich, Germany. We build what we like, never for money or for clients. We haul those frames home. We raise them from the bones of bikes from the beyond. As we drive the screws in, we drive out the ghost of our better judgment. We lose ourselves in cold steel, and, like glistening, soapy seals, we glide half-naked across the oily garage floor in the everlasting quest to find the Allen Key Size 5. It’s gone again, for fuck’s sake.

But a garage is just a garage. Parts pile up, unfinished builds hang from the ceiling, their chipped-off paint bearing witness to all the hardship they endured without complaint. Countless stories that take your breath away—and the room to work. Nobody should keep that many bikes, and bikes need to be free anyways, like wild mustangs, or some shit. So only briefly do we rise above our egos and break the sickeningly tight chains of accomplishment. “Roam free, you little horsies!” we say, as little else remains to be done but to air out our sweaty, oily shirts and swear that’s the end of it. Then the next bike calls, and we come back together in an endless maelstrom of clanking steel, tough love, and moldy rubber.
It’s a cycle, after all.