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Stefanie Schrank is a visual artist and bassist of the band Locas In Love from Cologne. Her first solo album is called ‘Unter der Haut eine überhitzte Fabrik’ (Under the Skin, an Overheated Factory) and sounds accordingly: like something bubbling underneath the surface, like machines working along until overheating, and like hidden secrets.
Together with the electro musician and DJ Lucas Croon (Stabil Elite, Bar) St. Schrank assembled her sophisticated Pop from analogue synthesizers and grooves both quirky and elegant. It is music of In-betweens and grey areas, of the Invisible and the Unheard-of, music that always prefers the sideways and back alleys to the obvious, straight road. The synth sounds have a super-concrete clarity while simultaneously being frantic, ecstatic and dreamy against the slow tempi of enraptured disco beats. Into this sonic landscape, Stefanie inserts her lyrics full of surreal and surrealistic moments and presents a very personal and intimate analysis of the future, bodies, neoliberalism, patriarchy, and depression.
Her writing is visual and associative, an automatic writing, which is fond of language because of how it sounds as well as of the images it can evoke. Here is a poet with the power to explain how she fights for control, how she struggles with her demons and who zooms in microscopically in order to figure out how things work as for instance love, anxiety, coexistence, language and ghosts. The abyss, humour and levity aren't mutually exclusive in this strange incarnation of pop.
Sometimes cool, sometimes exuberant, the songs stay surprising throughout, they will work towards a huge chorus only to then drop into a bottomless pit unresolved. Irresistibly enigmatic, a movie made of sound, noises like paintings. Suitable for teenagers to middle-aged music lovers. Not suitable for assholes.
