Die Quittung

In the artist's words:

With his project Die Quittung, Josen Bach has been working for several years on an independent form of German-language pop music that is defined less by stylistic attributions than by attitude and observation. His songs move between personal experience and social reflection - always with an eye for the quiet shifts in everyday life in a present characterized by acceleration, self-optimization and growing insecurity.

The third album "Extrawelt" marks a new focus within this development. While earlier releases were more episodic in nature, the new songs are condensed into a clearer thematic line. At the center are questions about the pressure to perform, doubt and the need for community - in other words, the tensions that characterize life in a late-modern society: the desire for self-realization on the one hand and the feeling of being permanently overwhelmed on the other.

The texts in Die Quittung are based on concrete observations, but refuse to be read as purely autobiographical. Instead, they open up a resonance space in which individual experiences are placed in a larger context. Closeness, distance, self-assertion and exhaustion do not appear as private states, but as shared social experiences.

Musically, the project continues to move in an open field between piano, band sound and alternative pop tradition. The songs do not follow any stylistic orthodoxy, but develop their form from the logic of the lyrics - sometimes reduced and narrative, sometimes rhythmically condensed. In this combination of laconic language and musical clarity, loose references to the songwriting traditions of Randy Newman or Rio Reiser can be recognized, without Die Quittung being absorbed by them.

Extrawelt" was produced together with Rolf Blumig in Leipzig's Haunted Haus Studio and mastered by Fritz Brückner. "Extrawelt" is less a completed album in the classic sense than part of an ongoing artistic process. The songs are not looking for simple answers, but for a form in which the present can be told in the first place.