It’s like a gentle notion. Like the feeling something has to change, to induce. Charlotte Salomon must have been driven by such a vague, moreover unambiguous feeling. When she draw for her life, when she put her own story between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to paper and questioned her world. Salomon died early; much too early, to find answers for herself. What speaks volumes about her inner fight, her quiet presciences and the perpetual not-arriving can be understood through “Leben oder Theater”. It’s a graphic stage play or - how it was called by herself - a sing play which isn’t either subsumable or describable. These are the sentiments of those pictures that don’t let off anymore.
“We circle the yes, we strike the no, we struggle for maybe - we do nothing at all” is the one I Might Be Wrong song chorus. A song that’s not on the new record of this Berlin band. Because everything circles just around these words, the state of those lines by singer Lisa von Billerbeck - there was nothing left to append. The song was never be finished, likewise it’s the key element of “Circle The Yes”. Since this record relates a state, which frightens and encourages, screams and keeps quiet, deranges and blesses at once: always coming closer to the ‘yes’ but never within one’s reach. It stays in the distance no matter how near it is. You try over and over to catch it, to come closer anew, imagine yourself shortly before the goal, until the distance falls like scales from your eyes. A quest for sense in an own loop.
Lisa von Billerbeck sings about this state with husky tongue, febrile head and shaken heart. And her band, who staggered vehemently between ‘yes’ and ‘no’, collapse and cohesion since 2004, the last year, melodizes this story, this sing play very stirring. I Might Be Wrong scratched at their essence, tilted back and forth, and got gradually down to boundaries and substance. Now they are one. After all inconstancy, the band surely not achieved their goal but a new level amidst another sentiment and inner tension which push them forward to new ground. No strained clattering, less casual rustling, and a lot more of every part of the ensemble, this creative cosmos of fellowship, in which that much has rotated the last two years. Imagine, Feist breaches Delbo’s bad weather front, or Cat Power kisses awake The Album Leaf and sends them to a yet more fantastic dream scenery. Undecided, entirely lost, or between the lines? No, the circle closes to good. “Circle The Yes” is a sing and sense play, in its intensity neither comprehensible nor describable by words. In fact it’s the images, that are drawn with every melody and syllable. Unambiguous, fingering, and always with this gentle notion. |
