Icon: enlarge
Masha Qrella (at a performance in Berlin 2019)
Photo: via www.imago-images.de / imago images / Martin Müller
Album of the week:
Masha Qrella - "Elsewhere"
Unfortunately, when pop artists try their hand at literature, the result is often too artistic.
In this respect, Masha Qrella's new album »Elsewhere« is already a fulfilled utopia in itself.
The Berlin musician does not turn the poetry of the East German writer Thomas Brasch into something convulsively intellectual or exhaustingly pretentious, but rather stunning, exhilarating, pure pop: melancholy, yet easy-going, often danceable hits that feel for that ideal pan-German identity that also follows 30 years of unity does not seem tangible.
Icon: enlarge
Cover of the album »Elsewhere« by Masha Qrella
Photo: State Act
Fortunately, there is now this wondrous pop album that spans generations.
Its longing for the "somewhere else" that nobody knows where or what it is, that everyone should - hopefully, for once - be able to agree, the ex-GDR citizen as well as the Wessi, the newcomer as well as the international expat who is there because of precisely this incompletion, the unfulfilled dream, ended up in Berlin.
Masha Qrella, whose real name is Mariana Kurella and was born in East Berlin in 1975, read the book “Ab Jetzt ist Ruhe”, which Marion Brasch published in 2012 about her brother, who died in 2001, a few years ago.
Brasch, son of a politician, writer and political dissident, had become a celebrated playwright and film director in the old FRG from the mid-1970s after leaving the GDR.
The theme of his work, again and again: the struggle with the torn German and own identity.
In Marion Brasch's personal look at her family biography, she recognized herself, says Qrella in the text accompanying the record: »I woke up from an amnesia!
That was my story too: my perspective and my past!
I even changed my name so as not to be reduced to my Eastern identity. «So she began to read Thomas Brasch's texts, and she never let go of them.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
Masha Qrella: Ghosts
Mogwai: Ritchie Sacramento
Stereo Total: Supergirl
SG Lewis feat.
Nile Rodgers: One More
Pauline Anna Strom: The Pulsation
Takt32, badmómzjay & JUMPA: Somehow it doesn't matter
The P: Life is theP
Andra Day: Tigress & Tweed
Cassandra Jenkins: Hard Drive
Lost Girls, Jenny Hval & Håvard Volden: Menneskekollektivet
Go to Spotify playlist Right arrow Go to Apple Music playlist Right arrow
Qrella has now selected and set 17 of them for »Elsewhere«;
the double album will be released exactly on the day Brasch would have turned 76.
However, she had premiered the songs in December 2019 on a legendary evening in the Berlin Theater Hebbel am Ufer, supported by musicians such as Andreas Spechtl (Ja, Panik), Dirk von Lowtzow (Tocotronic), the band Tarwater, the drummer Chris Imler and the Multi-instrumentalist Andreas Bonkowski, who are now - in addition to Marion Brasch - also on record as guests.
But »elsewhere« is above all Qrella's masterpiece.
Perhaps it makes sense that the musician who became known for instrumental post-rock music in bands like Contriva and Mina is still looking for the right language for her music.
With recourse to 1980s synth pop - from New Order to Laid Back - as well as the pulsating, playful Indietronic sound of the early noughties, she found musical clarity on her album »Keys« in 2016, which Dirk von Lowtzow thought of an »almost perfect pop -Work of art «.
She sang the lyrics in English, the international standard.
But that was a rather cumbersome articulation filter, as it turns out now.
On her EP “Day After Day” in 2019 she experimented with German text fragments by Heiner Müller and Einar Schleef, but only in the prose by Brasch, which she describes as the “David Bowie of German lyric poetry”, did she find the text that portrayed her ambivalent feelings about home and alienation so adequately that she is now singing in German with confidence for the first time, as if only the right words had been missing up to now.
display
Title: Elsewhere
approx. € 15.99
Price query time
February 19, 2021 4.30 p.m.
No guarantee
Icon: Info
Order at AmazonIcon: amazon
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
Qrella pours them into atmospheric chansons like »Blaudunkel«, the kitsch potential of which she keeps in check with garishly distorted guitars: »Into the blue and into the dark / Will everything smile once / Into the dark and into the blue / When you cry words today." Poetry in »Streets«, which Qrella underlines with hectic electro-jazz and synthetic handclaps: »Through the big cities, we walk through the hard light / seeing thousands of faces / we don't see our own."
Again and again the protagonists of these songs are forced out of the city's economic exploitation machinery, to the sea, the promise of unlimited freedom of development: Live here?
No thanks.
But where is this place, this state of affairs, which promises peace with one's own inner dissidence: "Where is somewhere else, and where is one different?" On the beach?
At the post office?
In the snow?
On Tuesday?
Or maybe tomorrow morning?
"How should I describe it to you," ask Thomas Brasch and Masha Qrella in the single "Geister" that thunders electronically through the abandoned city palace, "I can't dance, I'm just waiting." Right here, right now.
(9.0)
Listened briefly:
Mogwai - "As The Love Continues"
Escapist post-rock, as Mogwai have been perfecting for 25 years, could experience a revival in lockdown.
Hardly any other band (since Pink Floyd) has mastered it as grippingly as the Scots at sending the audience on journeys with yearning soundtracks.
On the tenth album it goes, with computer voices, into eternal droning guitars and hits like »Ritchie Sacramento«, into space.
Far out.
(8.0)
SG Lewis - "Times"
The British DJ and musician SG Lewis drops his long awaited debut album »Times« from the disco space directly onto the kitchen dance floor at home.
The highlight is the single "One More", in which funk god Nile Rodgers plays guitar.
Obviously, this raises comparisons with Daft Punk, which Lewis unfortunately loses in spite of beautifully nostalgic tunes for pop radio.
Still groovy enough.
(7.0)
Pauline Anna Strom - "Angel Tears In Sunlight"
The synthesizer pioneer and hippie spiritualist Pauline Anna Strom, who was blind since birth, also recorded her first album in more than 30 years in her apartment in San Francisco, surrounded by her beloved iguanas Little Soulstice and Ms. Huff - and numerous electronic ones, recently too digital instruments whose sounds she channeled rather than created.
A triumph of naturalistic, constantly pulsating esoteric music, the publication of which the musician, who died in December, unfortunately no longer experiences.
Part of the album proceeds will benefit the International Iguana Foundation.
(8.5)