Barbara Morgenstern - "Nichts Muss"

We talk for hours; Julia has a keen register of the movements of things and she's always moving herself, physically and intellectually. She talks about dancing as a beautiful caesurae of legs, arms, and movement; all 'inevitability', 'stubbornness', and 'spontaneity'. Her answers (a sort of talk-as-dance) ring halos round disappeared shifts, in sync with some aerial order and her own private rhythms.

So when I ask her my questions with the hushed veneration that her now legendary experience drilled into me she answers, gracefully, her own questions. I'll ask about Dilletantism versus Fanatacism, Good Taste/Bad Taste, and the White Noise Supremacists and she'll reply through with my original question in her head. In there she's on Barbara now, "you see Barbara's music is about death, for sure. OK, that's a cliche, I know." But? "But; but, but...” How long a pause. “Well, she definitely sings with this unnerving clarity, like, you know, from the penumbral clasp of approaching death. Yes, a sort of chiaroscuro of the blues, studded with the spicy darkness of remembered hurt, stroke, anticipated pain.” Remembered hurt / anticipated pain. “And her voice!, her voice has this, this minstrel invisibility: it's vocal gold panned from a long time gone of frustration, exile, sex, worry."

With Barbara's living room Julia's own private sanctuary and me her beguiled and willing guest: "And there's something wrong - or at least uncanny, niggling, odd - about the initial feeling you get from Nichts Muss, you know? It takes a few listens before it clicks, for sure: this is a heroine throwing herself into the fire, then hopping back out to dance around the kindling." Who knows what dreams this girl harbours, what future trajectories etched in hope on her heart? If only I could get her off her first love (German electronica) long enough to ask.

Barbara, all the while fussing round us, takes the needle of her record player pinched between two fingers and sets the svelt cartridge in its groove, filling the room with Lali Puna's extraordinary Scary World Theory. (We could almost walk amongst the musicians.)

"So, yes, you were asking about Nichts Muss," this is Barbara. "Julia, what do you think of it?" A coy glance, "is this it?" (Already elsewhere in her head). "You bitch." You would have laughed too. "It's not funny. She's always this way." I know.

"I'm really happy with this record. It makes me want to dance, look!" She holds up the cover, an off-white sleeve strafed with mini silhouettes of Barbara dancing. I see.

Lali Puna's Valerie Trebeljahr sings detached, an Eastern Bloc Railway announcer's stable plaisir, but Barbara's vocals are restrained phrases of subtle jouissance. It's beyond cliche now to bemoan the cold, sexlessness of the German language: the precise mathematical logic of the conjunctive, built words conspires straining out all rhythm or melody. But, oh that someone could force some melody through!, oh that someone intersperse the weave with gold! I would gladly race a train to hear it.

Barbara's is such a poet's idea of German.

Were Bjork's Vespertine not so lush and confusingly humble, immersed in its own emotional intensity, (a conversation between a cloying couple to the exclusion of everyone else - so private). Were it not settled in its seat of contentment but pulled hither and thither in great sheets of sadness and happiness of equal measure. Were its objects still fresh in their names: seated in a place where their names were still negotiable. Would that strings were replaced by brass. Or glitch replaced with click. The place where all these changes are wrought has Barbara the auteur behind Vespertine, and Bjork the author of Nichts Muss - a post-glitch death-disco for the uninvolved, the clubber who stays in, emotionally undecided, and still deciding.

The first time I hear Barbara Morgenstern's music, the weird scary emotional under-investment of "Kleiner Ausschnitt", I sit and play and replay the song, one note after the other starting each clock in the library into life. I remember this now, at the door, ready to leave, as I calm Barbara to a quiet, intently pressing my heart into her hands.

Found some interesting German poetry books from Amazon.