Luise Volkmann
Rites de passage
Buy / Listen
2023 / nwog 049
Line-Up:
Luise Volkmann - Composer, Saxophon
Patrick Grahl - Gesang
Wei Hung - Blockflöten
Quentin Coppalle - Querflöte
Shannon Barnett - Posaune
Annegret Mayer-Lindenberg und Louis Bona - Viola
Polina Streltsova - Violoncello
Yannick Lestra - Klavier
Dominik Mahnig - Schlagzeug und Schlagwerk
Michael Rexen - Voice
Jonas Albrecht - Drums
Louise Hjorth und Christina Lauridsen - Blockflöte
Lola Malique - Cello // Thibault Gomez - Piano und JACK Quartett
Luise Volkmann's "Rites de passage" is music of resistance and transition. It contrasts the life in which we settle with a utopian space that has yet to be established. The musical transformations take their cues from the concept of ritual. But Volkmann's artistic “rituality check” is also a political reality check that evokes the question of how we can overcome walls that actually exist in fact? Walls in the minds of hard heads. Concrete walls at borders. She neither adheres to preconceived genres nor does she stop at crossing the last threshold of existence - the preoccupation with death.
Luise Volkmann sees herself as an artist with a social idea of music. This self-conception expresses itself through the pieces of "Rites de passage" - performatively. They are the first songs she has published under her own name exclusively. Her starting point was the idea of foregrounding compositional experimentation over improvisation. At the same time, there is personal history in the collectivist spirit of the album. The recordings, made with varying ensembles over the last few years in different places, reveal a clear signature. They are the soundtrack of a period of life.
Luise Volkmann is the composer behind "Rites de passages" and plays alto saxophone on most of the pieces.
Making ghosts of the past audible without exploiting them as references in the present - Luise Volkmann comes close to this pop shamanism called hauntology on "Rites de passage" while mostly touching pop, new music, chamber music, electronica, jazz or improv by appropriating their influences in an inspiring mix of curiosity and negation and transferring them into other contexts. In the search as a ritual - for a new and future spirit - the magic of "Rites des passages" unfolds.
