Anika

‘Eat liquid’ is a work by Annika Henderson aka Anika for Edition Dur, commissioned by the Zeiss Planetarium.
The work is inspired by the psychedelia of the sixties and seventies, in search of the subject of consciousness, and poses a basic question: can music make our brains expand into other dimensions? Listening to this work one can certainly answer in the affirmative, although one must make some distinctions.

The relaxed and concentric notes of ‘Eat liquid’, which, as the title states, deals with the liquid and the ether, induce very specific states of consciousness, and throughout the record we hear sounds that we cannot find otherwise and that underpin the whole work very well. Anila’s record is a perfect record to listen to in a planetarium, where one’s gaze naturally rises to the sky, our home and our place of choice. Anika perfectly understands and permeates the psychedelic material, reworking it in an original way and always managing to give it a special, high-level interpretation.

Our minds are massaged and prepared for the journey by Anika’s warm, full voice and special music, between ambient, electronic and a certain very special pop taste.

In every corner of this work there is a surprise or a sound produced in a special way, unhurriedly and with the utmost care. Written during the Berlin winter, it attempts to give a sensible response to the escapism that is natural in these times. Anika said she wanted to create a safe place for our minds, inspired by Tiumothu Leary whose literary passages she reads, and she succeeds perfectly in doing so for a very special record.

 

Yelka

We remain in fertile Berlin while changing musical coordinates, with a very prolific band like Yelka with their new ‘1976’ for Fun In The Church.

Our band plays, just to give you some co-ordinates as the territory is vast, a very interesting and varied post krautrock, well composed and well played.

The band lands us in 1976, a very special year for music, with punk taking shape, krautrock was entering its artrock phase, folk was reinventing itself and funk was still going strong.

The album is a beautiful excursus into kraut, prog and rock, with a bit of funk and a lot of pop, all in a very free and enjoyable assemblage. There are no constraints, the freedom flows with the sound, we move seamlessly from kraut to kosmische to the purest, unadulterated maths. “1976” is an album that is born and grows totally free with a very engaging rhythm and very advanced sound solutions that always put the listener at ease.

There is something for everyone, from those who love the more instrumental and experimental stuff to those who still have that irreducible beautiful prog sound of the seventies in their ears, which just and thankfully does not want to go away.

Moreover, Yelka are attempting to reach the goal of ten records in three years, and in addition to quantity there is plenty of quality here, and you can hear it in every step. It comforts and warms the soul to listen to a free and unfettered record, with very warm and lively music, livid in an analogue way, in an era of great flattening, remarkable things are there just by looking for them, and this one is really worth it.