Voodoo Beach

In the organizer's words:

Support:Treasure

The band Voodoo Beach is an unlikely undertaking: In a time when songs are supposed to reveal their innermost after just 30 seconds, Voodoo Beach make music that doesn't readily want to blend into this noise around us. This is what makes their artistic approach so important.

The Berlin-based band has existed for several years in various line-ups, with Josephine Oleak on drums and John-H. Karsten on bass forming a well-rehearsed rhythm duo. In 2020, Voodoo Beach finally found its current line-up when Heike Marie Rädeker joined as vocalist and guitarist. The three musicians write new songs and rearrange old material with Rädeker - who immediately brings her style to the table.

She had previously played bass in the band 18th Dye since the 1990s, recording an album with Steve Albini and three Peel sessions. She also sang, but only in English, and never played guitar. Now the lyrics are in German and her guitar playing is just like her bass playing before: percussive, riddled with feedback - but also sensitive and melodious.

On Wonderful Life, Voodoo Beach's post-punk leans here and there towards noise rock with its uncouth, idiosyncratic capers. Primal forces that repeatedly devour Rädeker's catchy guitar riffs out of nowhere, Karsten's bass is then absorbed in the feedback and Oleak's otherwise so measured playing forgets itself in a roar. Destructive impulses that our minds gratefully absorb because they remind us that music can be anything: sheer escapism and unbridled dystopia.

Voodoo Beach also find a timeless poetry for these intensities that few German-language bands have been able to achieve in recent years. The lyrics speak of a self that - like all of us - has somehow ended up in this world and can face it with sometimes more, sometimes less strength, as in the song Die Hand: "Life on credit / And everyone joins in / Everything anthracite / The animals scream in the forest."

So how can we counter this "life on credit"? One possibility would be to counter all seduction and confusion with a fervent "no", as the song of the same name does in a wonderfully catchy way. Or an invocation of the Wonderful Life, as in the eponymous song, in which the Berlin songwriter John Moods can be heard alongside Rädeker - penetrating and unusually dark. Or the celebration of the flawed human being, of being human, to which Hendrik Otremba, author and singer of the band Messer, lends the morbid charm of his voice (Meine Seele).

"Nothing lasts forever" are the final words of the song Euphorie, the last one on Wonderful Life. And it's true: everything can, everything must be wiped away. The music of Voodoo Beach is an emphatic intervention here. It asks for truthfulness, for a sincere attitude towards our lives - and is therefore in every respect more than the transient noise that surrounds us: a physical, touching experience.

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