Fist Fight

Fist Fight was born out of the simple realization that I had never been in a fist fight. It is one of the songs I wrote during lockdown and therefore I had plenty of time to reflect on violence and its impact and write a song about it. The trip to the studio was my first trip after the borders had reopened and I was super happy to work on a couple of new songs. After having had a very nice experience with re:dasein on my previous single “Girls”, for which we worked remotely, I drove up all the way to Hamburg to work with them again.

Fist Fight is about the conflicts everyone finds in themselves at some point in life, about the fight between reason and instinct. In the writing process of the song, I explored the relief and pain we can find in violence. And I wanted to convey all of this through the music as much as through the lyrics and what you can hear now is what came out of it.

The studio we worked in was located in Muxi, one of the two producers’, flat and consisted of a single room. This was my first experience of working with Vale and Muxi in person, since before we had just had contact over chat. Before entering this experience, I was unsure of how we would get along or if our workflows were compatible. But of all these worries faded very quickly as we got to work. We found out very quickly that we speak the same language when it comes to music and that we had similar ideas for the song. We wanted to make it poppy and big, a song to sing along to. Along the way, we were influenced by artists like Lorde or Charli XCX, who both took popular music and put their twist on it, making it their own.

For the video to the song, I chose to work with Shade Cumini, a young artist from Luxembourg, whose work I had been admiring for a while and was waiting for suitable occasion to work with. After sending her the first mixes and explaining the concept of the song to her, we met up in a small cafe to talk ideas. I was immediately struck by her motivation and creativity. We started filming only a week later. This was a low budget shoot, but we wanted to make it look as good as possible.

To give you an impression of our set: we filmed in Shade’s garage and projected video material onto white fabric. Our team consisted of Shade, her brother who was responsible for the camera, Yann who played the second character, Ben who filmed behind the scenes and myself.

The idea behind the video was to oppose two different entities that fight each other exist within the same space. One side was represented by Yann who moved within a blue surrounding and fights the red persona, me. At the end they both meet and hug each other, to then go separate ways again. The goal was to avoid “cliché” fighting scenes but still show a fight on screen. Initially we thought of filming a boxing match, but that’s kind of hard to organise during a pandemic, so we went with this more abstract interpretation.

I will leave the finishing words for this article, to artist that inspired me a lot during the writing process of “Fist Fight”. The Czech artist Marina Abramović once commented on her piece Light/Dark, where she and her partner Ulay, slapped each other in the face for twenty minutes, that: "It is not the pain itself that matters. […] We were looking for a key, a way to break through the body, to open something up, which is a desire that comes from another side of truth or reality."