The combination of experimental pop with emotional depth and poetic playfulness is the trademark of Sophia Kennedy and her producer Mense Reents. On her new album, Squeeze Me, the Baltimore native, who for many years now calls Hamburg her home, expertly assembles her stylistically confident art-pop from elements as diverse as French house, bossa and electro-soul. The surrealistic images she creates in her lyrics are marked by magical realism and a deeply dark sense of humor, which act as a counterpoint to the grounded compositions and give the album its soul. The result is 10 moving pop songs whose melancholy and playfulness will resonate for a long time.
Anika, the German-British musician and former journalist, returns with her third studio album, Abyss, a work that is as political as it is personal. She channels her anger and confusion about the state of the world into ten raw and powerful tracks that, even more than on her previous releases, use the energy of college rock and the mood of dark electronics to support her haunting, demanding voice. Dealing with disinformation, the political shift to the right in many countries of the global North, the disintegration of democratic structures, and the struggles of marginalized groups, the album is more political manifesto than musical statement, even as its urgency projects a bright ray of hope on the horizon.
Berlin-based visual artist Jonathan Meese and Munich's DJ Star Hell challenge their audiences as the duo Meese X Hell. On their album, Gesamklärwerk Deutschland, they bang out "retro-futuristic future music for our meager German present" (Uwe Schütte in the amusing press release) that sounds a lot like Kraftwerk. After embarking on a wild journey through the most diverse styles of electronic music on their first album, from EBM to swinging house, they have now formulated their concerns and artistic strategies more clearly: From a radical artistic position, they use minimal retro-electro sounds and sparse lyrics for a fundamental critique of German reality, while at the same time offering the purifying power of (their) art, that they deem capable of solving all the ills of the present. See it any way you want, but it's good fun.
Kept outside these city walls
The tiger sang to me
From the wreckage of eternity
To his Caspian Sea
Unlike film adaptations, musical adaptations of literature are the exception rather than the rule. A very praiseworthy example of this rare art is the new album by Zach Condon, aka Beirut, who on A Study of Losses turns the fantastic book by German author Judith Schalanski An Inventory of Losses into music. Each song represents a chapter of the book containing a lost item, be it the Caspian Tiger or Sappho's love songs. With a grand gesture and the pathos that is typical for him, generously orchestrated and lavishly produced, the objects erased from reality are musically brought back to life, using sweet chorales, baroque arrangements, modular synthesizers, vintage string instruments, glockenspiel, you name it. Introspective, poetic and full of fine detail, A Study Of Losses adds another dimension to Schalansky's stories and builds a bridge from the past and its losses.
Berghain resident, modular synthesizer specialist, DJ and producer Sibel Koçer aka Jako Jako created her new album Tết 41 during a stay in Vietnam around the time of the Tết Lunar New Year celebrations, a magical melange of minimalist synthesizers and field samples, short audio snippets from the environment she recorded during the celebrations. In the airy arrangements, she captures the atmosphere, smells and sounds of Vietnamese spring, setting to music this recent journey with and to her Vietnamese mother's roots. The pieces are memories in sound of her impressions of this foreign homeland, the document of her search for a part of her identity and for the listener the fascinating experience of an imageless story in a million colors.
