Current Music From Germany  Popcast #1/2025

This Month with music by:

Cava | Buback
Spliff | Sony Music
Anadol & Marie Klock | Pingipung
Funny van Dannen | Trikont
Wolf Biermann | Clouds Hill
Author: Ralf Summer
Speaker (English): David Ingram
Speaker Female Voice-Overs (English): Louise Hollamby Kühr

   
When the two women of the garage rock duo Cava were growing up in Berlin, the riot grrrl movement in the United States in the 1990s was revolutionizing the gender dynamics of rock music. The patriarchy’s grip weakened, and a feminist subculture began to establish itself in music and art scenes around the world. Guitarist and singer Peppi Ahrens and drummer Mela Schulz continue this legacy on their second album Powertrip, both in their themes and their sound. Skillfully, furiously and with an eye to the future, the two weave the retro elements of their music into a contemporary guise of brute rock and combative energy. Initially dissatisfied with their work, they returned to the studio shortly before release to remix the album – it had veered too much into pop territory for their taste. Now with a perfect balance of high-class production and untamed live energy, it's clear: this is how garage rock should still sound in 2025!
 
The Berlin band Spliff is likely to be known by many outside Germany primarily as Nina Hagen's backing band. After fleeing the GDR in 1976 (she followed her stepfather Wolf Biermann, see below), the then 21-year-old singer had to search for a new band in West Berlin, eventually finding suitable comrades-in-arms in the political rock combo Lokomotive Kreuzberg. The group released the iconic Nina Hagen Band album in 1978, but the relationship only lasted a year: the band continued under the name Spliff and subsequently released four albums. Characterized by the extremely different influences of the band members, the consistently used (exclusively electronic) Simmons drum played by drummer Herwig Mitteregger and occasionally somewhat strange-sounding albums, the work is not consistently listenable. However, it also offered standout moments, particularly on their second album 85555 from 1982, which features notable gems of German pop music (Déja Vu, Carbonara). The tracks achieved great commercial success and are still part of the nation's pop music canon today. After this second album, on which the band seemed to have found themselves and developed their own sound, they later became entangled in increasingly bizarre experiments and finally disbanded. Their complete works have now been re-released by their record label.
    Wolf Biermann's biography is extraordinary, even by the standards of Germany's post-war generation. Born in Hamburg in 1936, the son of a Jewish worker murdered in Auschwitz, the artist decided to move to the GDR at the age of 16, at the time a fervent communist. He studied philosophy and mathematics, began to write poems and songs and shortly afterwards, in the early 1960s, also became known as a playwright. Due to his critical stance against the dictatorial regime of the East German state, he was banned from performing there a few years later and was finally expatriated in 1976 to continue his career as a singer/songwriter in Hamburg. His extensive catalog of around 300 songs has now been acquired by Hamburg artist and producer Johann Scheerer (The Mars Volta, Pete Doherty). In collaboration with Wolf Biermann himself, the album Wolf Biermann Re:Imagined - Lieder für Jetzt! features 22 cover versions of his songs by a diverse array of artists, including rap veteran Torch, trap icon Haiyti, German rock legend Wolfgang Niedecken and actress Meret Becker. The tracks, which tackle themes such as social justice, criticism of the GDR and dictatorships in general, freedom, democracy, the environment and peace, but also very personal introspections, sound uncannily relevant in their modern interpretations. This extensive and lovingly compiled project brings one of the most important political artists of the German post-war period into contemporary memory and reminds us of one of the most valuable and relevant catalogs of political art in Germany since Bert Brecht.
    La grande accumulation is a whimsical pop collaboration between Anadol aka Gözen Atila and Marie Klock, two artists from Paris and Istanbul, who seem to push each other to ever greater heights of eccentricity. It has been released by the fantastic, lovingly owner-managed Hamburg label Pingipung. The boundaries between analogue and electronic instruments are consistently blurred; what does it matter whether a piano or an old organ, a software synthesizer or a gentle whistle accompany the short, French-language tales from a distant, fantastical world? Even the wind is invited to contribute a melody when Marie Klock spins stories of collectors, hams, and nocturnal adventures. The magic of these pop gems lingers long after the last note fades.
  Songs to Go will be Funny van Dannen's final album. The author, visual artist, and songwriter – former founding member of the Lassie Singers – is leaving the stage with a sense of contentment, as he himself puts it. His stories, full of bitter irony and unfathomable absurdities, always rich with humor and poetry, have shaped the German music landscape since 1995, creating a void that may never be fully filled. Analogous to his farewell album, which was largely recorded live, Funny van Dannen usually only accompanied himself on the guitar, a master of quiet tones, a “genius of the trivial”, as Die Zeit once called him. But he was also quoted a lot and covered by punk bands such as Dackelblut or Rantanplan in particular. He has a deep friendship with Die Toten Hosen, one of the biggest German rock bands, and has released the majority of his albums through their label. Songs to Go showcases an artist at the height of his creative powers, who, due to “my generation's silly penchant for self-determination, or perhaps the impression that excessive production smacks of madness or hysteria”, is departing with his head held high.