On June 21 I’ll be playing acoustic at Bill’s Kitchen in Potsdam, a cosy outdoor restaurant, as part of the official programme of Fête de la Musique Potsdam. My set starts at 8:30 pm. Afterwards, I’ll be playing a relaxed DJ set with a few nuggets and gems off my Indie and Electronic collection.

A lot more anxious and nervous I am about my Acoustic concert on June 24 at Zimmer 16 in Berlin-Pankow. For one time only (and the first time ever) I’m playing in a duo ensemble together with a very dear friend and musical guest. We’re already welding some exciting ideas and little surprises for this concert. It’s bound to be a special, warm and exciting evening. Admission is 12€/6€ (reduced), reservations are already possible and encouraged.

Will I see you out there?

Keep on keeping up

Since the release of my first single Why Should I Run? off my then soon-to-come debut album in November 2020, thousands of people have listened to my singles, my album, my The City Has You Back EP, remixes and watched my music videos on YouTube, or watched my Erasure cover version. So much I-me-my, and it certainly was something I needed to get used to. And at the same time, I wasn’t always happy with the reception or pure numbers of plays, likes, clicks, you know it. It’s sad I feel I need validation through statistics, but that happens if music is often degraded to a product, with artists being labelled content creators. What made me happy were people giving honest feedback, love, and sometimes money via buying my album (hint, hint). And despite all the money, time and effort being spent, the overall journey was absolutely worth it for me.

Why Does Everybody Sound Like Me? – Remix album is out!

‘Ausfahrt’, as seen in the picture above, means ‘Exit’ in German, and so this is the last release for the whole era of my debut album. I’m happy, and a little relieved, to now begin new chapters in my musical work. (Which I, to be honest, already started scratching on, not the least with new remixes and projects as Sorry the Hedgehog, but also new music from e.no.)

Why Does Everybody Sound Like Me? is a fine collection of remixes of tracks from my debut album, including all remixes released so far, plus two new stunning ones by Atroxity and Part Time Alpaca. The variety of remixes is really beautiful, from Ambient, Deep House and Electronica over Breakbeat to Synthpop. Not included are the versions of The City Has You Back found on the EP with the same name.

As per usual, this album is available on all major streaming platforms, and of course Bandcamp where you can support me the most by buying it.

Here you’ll find the snippet containing the review/presentation, taken from the show:

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Yet it is here now. Containing twelve songs, all of them pop in some way, and at the same time all so different and beautiful(ly riped). Together with many guest musicians, namely Sebastian Krichler alias November Me, Gläser, Atroxity from Norway, Jalfonze, Gloria Blau, Didi, Torsten Knoll, Herzkasperl alias Anja Monden, Thomas Leisner from famous Unpluggedival and Delicious Drums, and Rick and Mark with a sample from their trans-gender podcast ‘Transphilosophisch’. Aand a lot of other people behind the scenes, helping with logo, photographs, videos, mastering, song critique and general cheer-up business.

It’s modern and retro, and walks through Acoustic Pop, Folk, Funk, Soul, Breakbeat, Hip Hop, Techno, Fusion Jazz, Nu Disco and Electro Pop. It’s an album about the ambiguity, the speed and the beauty of our modern lifes. It’s restless, harmonic and very much Me.

You’ll get the Limited Edition of the CD version very easily via Bandcamp, including digital downloads in many formats – or just the downloads, if you fancy 🙂 .

While we’re at it, if you’re interested in my doings, and you don’t want to employ your F5 key all the time on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you can easily subscribe to my new newsletter:

You’ll get to know in an irregular, but entertaining way what’s going on in the enoverse, once or twice a month tops. New music, fresh concerts (if ever possible), and a secret piece of music every now and then, exclusively to this channel. You dig?

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It’s out.

My very first single Why Should I Run?, taken from the forthcoming album to see the light of day on February 19, 2021, is a very positive, very uplifting, very electropop/synthpop/nu-disco song.

Yet, despite the easy-going feel, this song touches on what seems to have become a manner, a habit of our times: We’re always running, ticking off to-do lists, running around in circles to get our deeds done, hardly take the time to savour the moment. I literally have had that experience myself not too rarely, not getting my rest at night while sifting uselessly through things that await, tasks I could easily attend to at daytime. Why Should I Run? tries to convince you to take that moment for yourself. It should be noted that there is a lovely video for it on YouTube, starring a stressed-out Mathias Baresel winding through the office 🙂 .

It’s remixed.

I asked my friends from Berlin-based #Soulriders Tanga Elektra, and Elias, the drummer boy of the two, made me a fine Deep House remix: Why Should I Run (Boy DADA Remix).

It takes you on a darker, deeper trip than the positive original, and really plays out its roughly six minutes to elaborate on a more club-ready level. Note the intriguing live-played bass recorder lines a friend of Elias provided for the remix!

More to come!

As announced, there is much more around the corner. The album is finished, and the CD format goes into production in a few days. And I feel it has become a solid state-of-mind for my music as e.no, it feels really fresh and up-to-date for me. I originally planned it to be much more electronic, and in the end it turned out to be rather song-based, and surprisingly acoustic. With a lot of helping hands and people who contributed their own trade of musicality and talent at various ends of the album. But more of that when the time has come 🙂 .

The situation in the world in the preceding months created something that – judging from its title –seemed to stem exactly from the song by INA INA: a desert. Social interactions were and still are restricted, and especially artists of any kind, relying so heavily on coming togehter with other people, couldn’t perform. Many creatives lost most of their income.

An outcome of the lockdown, on a positive note, was a huge increase in productivity for many of us. New art has been created, brushed, cleaned up and released in such a vast number like never before. For how long that’s going to go well, and if free downloads and streaming concerts are to be the new normal is another story.

Personal desert

Long before this crisis arose, INA INA released their song Desert. The band and I played a double concert back in 2018 when they were still going by the name EXCRM. We instantly liked each other, and not long after I had the idea of doing a remix for the band.

Desert, equipped by the way with a beautiful video, is a somewhat easy-going indie pop track about longing, looking back and coming back. The underlying sweet melancholy was what got me in the first place, giving the song a shimmer of elusiveness.

Kill your darlings, fast

Most of times, I’m starting off songs and remixes with a tiny idea. It’s often just a starting point from which I depart and get somewhere completely different. Like a sketch, bearing not much similarity with the actual outcome later. Often it hurts to say goodbye to ideas you worked on for hours or days, when you finally realise it won’t fit or is in the wrong place in the song.

Desert is hugely based on the lead singers’s vocals using the typical autotune effect. To me, this overly technical approach of autotuning always creates kind of a distance, as if someone is singing through acrylic glass. In my own production, mostly for other people, I use it sparingly on backing vocals, or over-obviously in-your-face.

The compactness of the original, derived from the quiet, peaceful dynamics and the tuned vocals, challenged me to do two things. Firstly, to not cramp it up to a dance-able 120BPM+ party version, but keep it relaxed, and secondly, to seek for vivid elements to bring a new shape to the song. Would I be able to write on the story of yearning and the promise of coming back and being together? Or would I simply kill someone else’s darling?

Bear your darlings then

With this remix – or rework, as the intensity of re-doing the original suggests – I developed a soulful guitar sample as accompaniment and a relaxed beat, swaying somewhere towards Downbeat and Trip-Hop, unified by a groovy bassline. Normally, the sound would be too euphoric and drained in melody for proper Trip-Hop. As I was gathering the basics for the remix, I decided to go a new way – to transport the spirit and the lyrics further and write a rap that tells my perspective on the (alleged) story of the song. I reminded myself of 90s Massive Attack, when they combined Downbeat with rap – so it’s kind-of Trip-Hop again.

Dazer with my laser

I had never written rap lyrics, especially not in English. Pop songs, over-generalised, tend to be differently designed in terms of text size and effort, more comparable to poetry. Shorter, compressed, and only to a certain degree linear and plainly comprehensible.
With such a toolkit you’d have a hard time confronting the task of writing a rap. Rhythm and rhyme are essential (many of my songs bear a rhyming structure), without a continuous and developing flow it ain’t gonna hit it. And I couldn’t work with shortened, poetry-like hints of text, a lot more content was needed, even for one single verse.
Since English is not my mother tongue, I had a rhyming and an English dictionary lying on my desk, waiting to be utilised.

Honestly, no real idea how well I did. I still like my lyrics, and my first attempt, and even the idea of not taking the text format too seriously. Not being to obvious and not too definite (‘What is the author trying to convey?’), kind of still keeping my own place in it. I also added some background (and foreground) vocals after the rap and pushed in a bit of gospel feeling. A vocal solo which I recorded finally got ditched (so much for darlings) and brought back as an short autotuned sample in the end.

Heard the song yet, folks? It’s out as a free download and stream. And soon with a micro music video.

Baby, du hast mir den Kopf verdreht

It was my last year of studying and I had – lo and behold – about all the time in the world, and so I attended most of the rehearsals and probably saw the piece fifty times in total. While shooting photos and writing texts for marketing the play, I came up with the idea of writing and recording something I normally deeply despise – a Schlager, the worst possible form of German folk music. Even though I wasn’t anywhere near as musical and actively playing and writing as now, I couldn’t let this idea slip. So Die Liebe im Visier was born.

The ugly kid

Bearing any deeper sense, and with its plastic and overly simplified structure and sound, Schlager in Germany is commonly laughed at by anyone with a faint sense of musicality. It’s like Bild-Zeitung – everyone knows it’s trash, but still people turn to it and consume it.

Getting to grips with Volksmusik

So, how do you approach a Schlager? I tried to memorise what I heard from my grandma when I was a child – back then, she was listening to Heino and Roy Black as if there was no tomorrow, and no other way of behaving as an elderly woman. I believe I derived most of my inspiration from those two, and listened to a lot of songs in preparation, before I collected what I thought would deem fit for a close-to-nature Schlager. Ultra-cheesy lyrics, never a bit inconclusive or double-layered with meaning, straight to the point. Vocals that make you dream of better times, a better world, or just your weird rich uncle with his gold teeth and overpowering perfume. A beat you could water your plants with. Simple, bell-heavy synth sounds, made in heaven. Orchestral hits to finally deliver the punch message in the chorus.

Out now!

I actually tried to hit as many cliches as possible, while still keeping a sense for originality – it shouldn’t be all slapstick. And it worked pretty well, so I thought, well, let’s give people in these times something to chew on.
You can now hear the song and two extra versions on all streaming platforms, or buy it on Bandcamp and the usual places. I threw in one rather elevator-musical chillout piano version (it was the intro of the play) and an attempt at a Trance version, which got actually never into the play itself.

Enjoy!

Back in Berlin I was greeted with a grey and very autumnal city. After all, the whole week I was on the road was quietly to furiously rainy. On paper, this would be very depressing, but I was more than happy having the chance to spill out my voice onto so many stages at so different places and having made some new membranes and hearts oscillate in time with my songs. I had so many beautiful, surprising, strong and emotional moments and shook a multitude of hands, and had a lot of not-so-superficial talks about life and music, with intimate and new people, and hands down never felt lonely, despite being on the road alone.

I’m far from being a car maniac. I love to travel by bike, by train and enjoy running. So many kilometres on the road does mean uproar and tension for me – always careful not having my car break down. And following the idea behind my new gem “Heads up!” I wouldn’t want to persuade anyone that touring (only) means hovering honourably from one stage to another, with a constant stream of applause and fun. You’re never really long at one place, mostly don’t get to see the city you’re playing at. You’re passing through chains of road works driving seven hours to your next gig, and possibly arrive at a place you don’t receive the warm welcome you were hoping for as a small artist. Or see yourself faced with miserable technical conditions that no-one can actually operate. You’re getting last-minute cancellations, because your host just realised he couldn’t actually do the concert. Or you’re booking an AirBnB that is plain dirty and a horror, and receive your feedback in return: “The guest urinated into my room. He would be better suited in a barn.” 🌧

Lucky for me, I shared so many beautiful moments, so many enchanting hours with my and the music of others, got back so much energy and never got the feeling that I didn’t give it all I’ve got, or didn’t get to the core of people. That is a gift I am utterly thankful for, and I wouldn’t have dreamt of some time ago. I met so many exciting (and some weird/drunk) people, experienced new ideas and new ways of thinking and spent warm hours with friends. Back in my capital and with my family, I enjoyed a few days off-time and finally get back into new projects and recording my debut album. And just move along.

Danke, takk and thank you.

Yours sincerely,
e.no

For that I do not grow utterly lonely I’ll plunge into a tour, one year after my Debut EP „I really, really like the light“. I’ll be returning to some known places and will discover some new ones, and I am really (really) looking forward to cosy atmospheric (like in Kellinghusen) to bigger and louder (like the Pop+ Synth Festival in Copenhagen) concerts. Let’s start off with Unpluggedival on Oct 26 in Berlin!

• 26.10. e.no (acoustic) | Unpluggedival 2019, Alphi’s Eis, Berlin
• 1.11. e.no | Bi uns to huus, Kellinghusen
• 2.11. Pop+ Synth Festival, Kopenhagen
• 3.11. Music Bean, Mokkariet – Jagtvej, Kopenhagen
• 3.11. Cph Listening Room, Kopenhagen
• 5.11. e.no | 3Raumwohnung, Oldenburg
• 7.11. Songwriter Open Stage #41 – Opener: e.no, Brückenstern, Hamburg
• 8.11. e.no // Live & DJ-Set, Einladen72, Rostock
• 9.11. e.no | Café Koeppen, Greifswald