Left Pop: The Faces of Friends

“He eats his quinoa in peace/his beets, talks about yoga/Don’t stop grinning in a relaxed manner/he and his organic beluga lentils!” The Berlin musician, songwriter and poet Katharina Kollmann, who calls herself Non-Seattle in her stage life , takes on the typical hipster performers in her song “Beluga”. They read books by women “so proudly,” talk about the “concept of love,” are generally aware of it (for example, “that everything is regulated by the market alone”) and make “bad jokes,” but in real life There’s not much you can do with them. The only thing that helps is: get away! Get out! “I’m stepping on our market share,/ shooting it away and driving for a while/ through my hometown at night.”

This “hometown” is a utopia of non-Seattle, which she presents to the people in her “condominium” in one of the central and wonderful eight minutes of thrillingly meandering songs without regard to radio suitability on her new album.

Non-Seattle sings an ode to vulnerability, she is a modern sister of Sisyphus: “All the attempts make us sore.” But from this she gains strength, from vulnerability and openness becomes self-empowerment: “It’s the best reason of all/to be a little outrageous to suffer,/ to exaggerate a bit,/ to have a bit of a stupid crush,/ to keep falling out of a world like this,/ that doesn’t have any real houses.” And her “most beautiful find” on the night-time journey through her home town are ” These are the faces of friends who calmly talk about what they are really feeling at the moment.”

“Haus” is the name of the new album by Nichtseattle, who has been one of the great songwriters of our time since her previous album, “Kommunistenlibido”. “House,” of course, is not a completely new topos in pop music: “Our house is a very, very, very fine house,” sang Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1970. There is a cat in the yard, the earlier one Life was indeed hard, but “now everything is easy because of you and our house”; That’s how simple and undercomplex things were in the Californian hippie world back then – songwriter Graham Nash was able to write an ode to the blissful domesticity he lived with Joni Mitchell in her house in the legendary Laurel Canyon.

In today’s capitalist realism, everything is more complicated, and non-Seattle defines the possibilities of the home town through: “condominium”, “daytime café”, “prefab apartment”, “old building apartment”, “paper house”, “door frame”, “passenger shelter”, “rehearsal room”, “Castle”: these are subtitles of their songs and therefore options for “home”. The tent is perhaps the simplest dwelling that still keeps everything open, in front of which the musician can be seen on the album cover.

“Treskowallee” is the title of the accompanying song, in which the singer sees herself as a “sports bag child” (what a beautiful creation of a word, in a sense a counterpoint to the well-known baseball bat years), “who goes home alone for hours/ and wraps the bag around her own legs « and »cross the Treskowallee without looking«. She sings this to an idiosyncratic electric guitar melody, and her sighs “Well,” “Well,” and “So what” are accompanied by various, slightly angled accordion sketches. In the last verse, the band stays with her – the singer only gets loud when she sings about “all your stupid possibilities” in these times; and the song, which is also a very strange love song, ends with a dreamy clarinet melody.

The tent song is followed by “Shelter (Schirmpilz)”, in which Nichtseattle formulates the essential component of her utopian house, namely the community, the kinship of all people (a term that she borrows from Donna Haraway borrowed): “I think we’re all related. / It’s the one shelter / under which everyone really fits / because it can grow in the rain.” A house is not a thing, but a relationship. Katharina Kollmann’s house is a verb.

In this song we can also observe a stylistic device that the artist likes to use: depending on the content of the previous verse, the chorus of a song is changed. When there was talk of closeness in love, she sings: “I think we’re all related.” If the other person suddenly withdraws without explanation, “just wants to get away” and is “just looking for peace and quiet,” the refrain goes: “I think Nobody is related here/ There is no shelter!” And then, in the face of new closeness – “it was your skin and mine/ it’s always both” – to return to the hopeful original refrain: “on solid ground, that’s how it works, / because we are not alone here.”

In this song there is also a beautiful, four-line reference to a wonderful song by Gerhard Schöne: »I think it was the two of us,/ when we lie here, there is still chalk on us,/ which is written big on the walls:/ Me “I want this to never go away!” is how Non-Seattle sings about her “Maybe it’ll never be this nice again” moment.

In general, a certain GDR song art always stands out in a positive way. I would perhaps even stand on the kitchen table of, say, Gröne- or Distelmeyer and say to their faces that since Gisela Steineckert (for example “The Excellent” about a painting by Wolfgang Mattheuer), Werner Karma or Fritz-Jochen Kopka (I also think of “Sehnsucht nach der Schönhauser” by Barbara Thalheim when I hear Non-Seattle’s “Treskowallee”) no one has written such good German “pop” song lyrics as Katharina Kollmann. She is also an excellent poet.

There is a very unique, tender, delicate sound in her lines. And every now and then she even manages a Brechtian moment, for example when she develops a positive utopia in “Dugout,” then revokes it in the next verse and finally returns to it. This is reminiscent of Brecht’s “On the Kindness of the World” from the “Hauspostille” (1927) and the “Gegenlied” (1956), only all in a single song. Brecht’s “Counter-Song” also ends with a “hometown” utopia: “It seems better to us to rebel/ And not forego the slightest joy/ And to vigorously fend off those who cause suffering/ And to finally make the world a home for us!”

Not Seattle dares to say “I” again and again, sometimes confidently, sometimes doubtfully and questioningly. “I think it’s nice when you show yourself,” she says. And she takes a lot of time for this in almost every song on her album – just as much as is necessary, as the respective song needs, even if it’s six or eight minutes, which makes a mockery of any radio format. Your “I” is always just a possibility of your own self and completely free from egoism and vain belly button staring.

In »Being a woman (workshop)«, another central song – if the (music) world were a different, better one, it would undoubtedly be a hit that would be played everywhere – she plays a confusing game with us: “I don’t want to, / I don’t want that !/ Be a woman, be a woman«. But the way she sings it: she emphasizes “woman” and follows “his” shortly after. And then: “I won’t do that, I won’t do that!” And finally: “I wouldn’t say anything/just hug her,” to which she adds a succinct “but she can’t do that for that long.”

In the following “Heiterprofan (rehearsal room)” it starts right away with: “I want it too!/ Heiterprofan”, and she writes beautiful lines like “Where I am, here is:/ Concrete walls four” or “Some call it free,/ I have loose hands two”. And Sisyphus: “Up the mountain with a stone/Weekend, no.”

And the music? The record company’s laundry list lists PJ Harvey, Nirvana and “folky indie rock” as references, and you notice the embarrassed question about which drawer you should nail all of this to the bottom. I think what we’re hearing here is mainly new, folk-oriented and very cleverly arranged chamber music, more Eisler than Americana (and sometimes you can perhaps also think of Element of Crime). Plus there are always indie rock outbursts. But it’s “not Seattle”, this isn’t grunge or rock ‘n’ roll or punk or anything with “post-“.

Non-Seattle plays cleverly with dynamics and harmonies, with sounds and instrument groupings layered over and against each other. She enjoys using her baritone guitar as a soloist, as the perfect framework for her poetry. When additional instruments or choral singing are added, these effects are cleverly chosen. You can hear careful brass inserts, fine accordion sounds, sometimes even quite surprising recorders – and the restrained, wonderful harmony songs are something to kneel down on, for example the choir in “and if we could, we would just always stay here”. Katharina Kollmann is an experienced arranger, her fellow musicians are excellent, and the producers Olaf OPAL and Sönke Torpus give the music the space it needs.

Playing softly is always more complicated and difficult than playing loudly. And thinking, observing and writing sensitively takes more effort, but is more fulfilling and often more insightful. Adrianne Lenker’s new album was released just a few days ago. She is also a songwriter who can express anything with an acoustic guitar and her voice, and she has also gathered a band around her that carefully and with fine nuances gives the songs an additional color. But where Lenker can be considered a kind of neo-lo-fi, Non-Seattle is more neo-hi-fi. Either way, it is once again the smart women who have something new to tell us about our world and our existence, and who do so with extraordinary aesthetic awareness.

But Katharina Kollmann adds an additional layer to all of this. She sings news from the precarious country that is mostly ignored in today’s middle-class pop culture. For some people, a “house” is just a capital investment, an investment, an “old building apartment” inherited from their parents (“whatever – in the end everyone wants a light-flooded old building shit,” Helmut Dietl already knew). Non-Seattle counters this with their utopia of solidarity and collectivity, which does not end at the doorstep. In the conversation, she reveals that it is important to her to stick to something or try something out even if it supposedly doesn’t actually “work.”

Perhaps she learned this attitude as a GDR child growing up in Berlin-Karlshorst and refined it as a woman living in the unsophisticated part of Prenzlauer Berg. She has this as the place for our conversation Cultural Market Hall in the middle of the prefabricated buildings of the Mühlenkiez, a social, non-commercial cultural and meeting place developed in 2018 from a former department store, where she also leads the “Kaufhallen-Chor”. “Everyone” is welcome there, a space of opportunity in the best sense of the word, a utopia – a home for everyone.

»It seems to me that eastern leftists are a little different than western leftists. That Eastern Leftists are a bit more socialist – they look at the world in a more systemic way and not so individually and morally,” says Katharina Kollmann, while the clacking of table tennis balls can be heard from the next room. “Tear everything down and then laugh with sadness,” she sings in the last song on her album. And it ends: The morning after, “we can just be here and make ourselves related!” So ​​let’s definitely move into the non-Seattle house and live a new kinship. Even if it might just be an umbrella mushroom, a rehearsal room or a tent for the time being.

Non-Seattle: “House” (act of state). Up in spring Tour

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