Farbfilm

So, I wrote, produced and released an EP in midst of a pandemic… And here's what it was like:

At the beginning of lockdown in March, I experienced, what felt like an existential crisis, because I felt the pressure to write new music, because it felt like the ideal moment to be creative, but I was just not able to. No matter how hard I tried I was completely unable to draw inspiration from anything. At the same time, I saw a lot of artists peak in creativity and using their newly gained free time to create. The pressure I felt only added to my inability to writing music. After two months of struggling, a Luxembourgish radio station (100,7) asked me to commission a song, that could be added to a lockdown compilation. So, I finally forced myself to write something and that's how “Post” came about. I was inspired by simple everyday experiences and so I wrote a song about my post lady that passed by my house every day. With “Post” I had broken my writer¢s block and shorty after I started writing “Pool Party”, “Industrial Salt” and “Fist Fight”. I had already written “Paikea” earlier that year.

I decided to compile an EP out of these 5 songs, because I noticed a certain coherence between all of them. I consciously used a lot of visual imagery and language in all of them. When I was done writing all 5 songs, I was able to see the bigger picture and they all appeared to be different photos on a film roll. This is also where the title of the EP comes from, “Farbfilm” means colour film in German. I wanted to paint a different image with every song that at the end would compile into a whole.

That¢s on writing an EP during a pandemic, the second challenge was producing it and having to cross a border to do so. I was super happy to have worked with Vale and Muxi from re:dasein on the entire EP, the only problem was they live in Hamburg. The first three songs were recorded in June, which was no big deal because the border between Luxembourg and Germany had just reopened. We planned to record the last two songs in September though. Because Luxembourg had crossed the daily limit of COVID cases per inhabitant imposed by the German government, I was only allowed to travel to Germany if I self-quarantined for two weeks. And as you could have guessed, I didn¢t have that much time on my hands. Thanks to the internet it was still fairly easy to work remotely. Plus re:dasein have a very good feeling for my taste in music and the sound I seek for in my songs. So “Industrial Salt” and “Pool Party” were produced in Hamburg by Vale and Muxi while I was in Luxembourg and we talked on the phone several times a day so I could give feedback on what they had worked on. Working remote was a pretty new experience and even though, re:dasein did a very good job, I still prefer working on site.

After the writing and producing, came the releasing, which in many ways was the hardest step of the process for me. This is the second EP I released, for the first one I threw a big party and my people showed up to the show and I could physically feel everything that was happening. This time around though in the two weeks prior to the release I regularly forgot that I was releasing an EP because it felt so far away. All that changed was that five songs appeared on the internet; this alone was already a very abstract idea. But in the last few days, I started to feel very excited again. On Friday, the 27th, the day of the release I felt the same buzz I felt for the last release. Sitting nervously in class, checking my phone way too often and feeling relieved that this part of me had finally been released into the world.

To compensate for my release party, my mother had the great idea to still throw a party. It was her, my partner and myself. We ordered pizza, played games and ate cake. And for the first time in this entire journey I felt sincerely proud of what we had done.

“Farbfilm” is a piece of me, because not only are all of the topics very personal but this compilation also marks an evolution in my music and in my song writing. It’s bold, it’s loud but sensitive and I have gotten a big step closer to finding out what I want and who I want to be throughout this process.

This was the story and the emotional roller-coaster of “Farbfilm”.