Luis Ake

In the organizer's words:

Who is this Luis Ake anyway? Does anyone know? Does he even know himself? Or does it perhaps not matter at all? Is it not enough for us to fall under the spell of this mysterious man and his melodic dream world? A world that he spans between bass and falsetto, with pathos and no fear of vulnerability, of new expressions of masculinity, broken by androgyny that turn masculine clichés into ridicule.

Since Ake's 2019 debut "Bitte Lass Mich Frei" recalibrated what pop can mean in German, nothing has been the same. He moves through the imaginary boundaries between genres, crossing them and connecting the unexpected as if it were an easy thing to do. When Ake sings, it sounds strangely familiar, but at the same time outrageously new and forward-looking. Synth Pop and Dark Wave meet Italo Disco and NDW, Pet Shop Boys dance with Enigma, Grönemeyer shakes hands with OMD, and H. P. Baxxter towers above it all and lets a trance storm rain down.