Electronics – A concert like a melodrama: Tarwater in Berlin

It’s been ten years since Tarwater’s last album, but you can’t tell from the music. In the sense that the clicks, the melodies, beats and noises that the band put together at their Berlin concert at Hebbel am Ufer on Friday could just as easily have been produced in 2008 or 1998. The same applies to the new album “Nuts of Ay”.

Tarwater were part of the first wave of electronics in the late 1990s. At that time, a sea of ​​sounds emerged in this country, manufactured by laptop artists, and Tarwater, Kreidler and To Rococo Rot, three bands in which there was and is overlapping personnel, were something like an electronic project triumvirate. The music was latent to manifestly cerebral and derived its excitement and beauty not from the groove, but from the sound layers: headphone electronics.

There is nothing outdated about the timelessness of the sounds on Friday because the stoic persistence is, so to speak, part of the sound world of Tarwater itself. Ronald Lippok’s voice is one of the most sonorous; in comparison, even Leonard Cohen, for example, still seems like Mariah Carey. Lippok’s voice stands in flowing soundscapes and describes rather than expresses anything emotional. However, this results in a real charge, and Tarwater are something like the quiet melodramatics of the three bands mentioned. If the concert at HAU had been a film, it would have been a melodrama, told by a narrator who has already seen and experienced everything.

As an aesthetic concept, this works just as well this evening as it did in 1998 or 2000, the years in which the style-defining Tarwater albums “Silur” and “Animals, Suns & Atoms” were released. The live band of Lippok and Bernd Jestram, who had already performed together in the East Berlin avant-garde band Ornament & Crime, expanded live into a trio, and then played many, one could say, classics, alongside new pieces that fit into the overall picture without any break. “All of the Ants Left Paris”, “Watersample” and, as the last piece before the encore, “Seven Ways to Fake a Perfect Skin”, the song that conveys the serene drama that the band is more than 20 years old staged in their pieces, musically and lyrically concentrated.

There is something subliminally very touching in this music, and you can’t determine exactly where it comes from, also because the band demonstratively avoids any classic form of emotionalization in pop: three musicians on stage, largely motionless. If anything did move, it was when Ronald Lippok turned to the screen behind him to look at some visuals. But maybe that’s precisely why: you cross out everything that is immediately expressive and transfer every feeling, encoded, into the demonstrative, academic sound design.

The evening ended with a piece by, of all people, the Pogues, played in a way that seemed like it was about forming an antithesis to a folk punk band. Drunken and excessive there, ostentatiously sober and hyper-controlled here. Nevertheless, Shane McGowan’s lyrics have their effect: »When I was young, I watched the cars / When I was older, I drank in bars (…) I found a love, she gave me dreams / She left me drunk in New Orleans / So cold and lonely, so all alone / I wished my heart was made of stone«. A somewhat programmatic conclusion that nicely summarizes Tarwater’s approach to his own music and to pop history.

The evening was opened by the Morning Stars, the new band led by keyboardist and singer Barbara Morgenstern, whose first albums had been released at the same time as Tarwater’s. The bassist Alex Paulick otherwise plays with Kreidler, among others, who in turn are personally connected to To Rococo Rot, in which Tarwater singer Ronald Lippok also plays. Guitarist Felix Müller-Wrobel and drummer Sebastian Vogel used to be with the Hamburg band Kante.

This constellation creates a complicated art-pop that likes to stoically insist on a short melody or a stoic rhythm, only to then repeatedly pull up the curtain and show the respective piece on widescreen. To convert the classic indie loud-quiet dynamic into alternating between “closed” and “open”. In this respect, Morning Stars at HAU fit perfectly with Tarwater, even if both bands sounded completely different.

Tarwater: »Nuts of Ay« (Morr Music)