What better way to start the year 2025 than with a campfire deluxe in the city's coziest club with a program in a class of its own, namely this one:
Maria Basel is a singer, composer and producer. Deeply rooted in the Bergisches Land and Ruhr music scene in Wuppertal, she took her first step into a larger echo chamber in 2020. The sound of her solo project of the same name brings together her strengths as a classically trained musician and her preferences for electronic sounds, jazz and RnB. With melancholic harmonies, flickering loops and reflective lyrics, Basel processes encounters from her life in her music, leaving plenty of room for interpretation and association by the listener. She constantly benefits from her contact with diverse genres and tries to discover new unknown territories with her music.
Stereo Naked are the New Zealand double bass player Pierce Black and the banjo player Julia Zech when they enchant their audience with this unusual combination. They met through the Cologne bluegrass scene and have developed their very own folky "naked" sound on this basis. After many kilometers together, adventurous tours through Europe from Ireland to Lithuania, their second album "Unseen Course" was released in 2022. It has been particularly well received on British soil, being played several times on BBC radio and Deutschlandfunk also says: "With simple yet beautiful harmony vocals over calm fingerpicking, Stereo Naked conjure up a few rays of sunshine on the soul." At their live concerts, charm collides with dry humor and every song is a little hand-crafted story. What Stereo Naked achieve is their shared passion, namely to take bluegrass out of its niche and make it playful and touching for a wide audience with their songwriting. There is no calculation or filter to what they do. It's exactly what they are and sound like.
German-language indie rock/wave/pop/post-punk... It used to be different. Neuser stood for indie pop with a British flavor. Then came the pandemic and something had to change. Update: successfully executed. Because they've gone one better, both in terms of instrumentation and lyrics. The last three single releases ('Filme', 'Angst' & 'Flashbacks') reflect this updated path: lyrics that are still written by life or that describe life. Between unambiguity and ambivalence, between chaos & hope. Gems of everyday life that yearn for normality. Sometimes restless, sometimes helpless, unadorned beauty. Urgent, heartfelt & convincing.
This content has been machine translated.