Listen to song sketches from upcoming Midi Grrrl EP

Thanks to everyone who pre-ordered the Midi Grrrl EP. It is so heartening to make a record, knowing that some people have already pre-ordered it. A huge thank you. Until the record is finished, here are a few short song sketches for you. Nothing close to full songs, and some of them won’t make it to the final cut, but it might give you an idea of how synth heavy this record is going to be!

xo midi grrrl

Listen Up! Festival

Listen Up! Festival is coming up this weekend. It’s a two day music festival “to change the rules” and I am so excited for this weekend of super talented musicians, super interesting workshop leaders and a panel discussion on the theme of “arty berlin – who is it for?”.

I’ve been working on the festival, which is funded by the Berlin Music Board, since June and this is the home stretch…at this point I am all strung out! I have to do physical activity to relax my mind and body. I have had so little time to do music and approach it like a sweet stolen treasure. So the other day, whilst waiting for the kettle to boil, I played a little synth and recorded this messy sketch below. It was a sweet short burst! Maybe you’ll hear one of the tracks in the flesh and in the fullest when the festival is over.

Until then, it would be wonderful to see some old and new faces at Listen Up! this weekend. I will be there from the start to the end, at the concert in Gretchen on Friday, the workshops and panels on Saturday and the concert in Südblock on Saturday night. And honestly, the line up is the bomb! Check it out here.

xo midi grrrl

listen up, berlin, kreuzberg

Violent Vickie played in Kreuzberg.

Violent Vicky

Violent Vickie are an amazing synthpop/riot GRRl band from Oakland, California currently on tour through Europe.
Their influences are Bikini Kill and the Beach Boys, and their sound is frantic fast paced 4/4 electropop.
Perfect for dancing, perfect for crowd surfing!
They use multimedia elements in their live shows such as projections and stripper poles.

We went to see them in Kreuzberg on a stormy monday night.
Whether it was ionically charged atmosphere, or the innumerable support acts, by the time Violent Vickie took the stage, every person in the awkwardly shaped Waterloo venue was jammed to the front, craning to see.

Watch the whole gig here:

Their song “Drugs” talk directly to the audience,
and “Beauty Store” speaks out against the pressure to conform that oppresses us all.
But, it is in songs like “Money is Mine“, as band comes into dialogue with each other,
that the show begins to rocket.
Tension is released for the band, but not for the audience, who won’t let them go,
unlocking the rare quadruple encore achievement.

The Violent Vickie 2013 European Tour continues in to the UK this week:

1. August: Retro Bar, Manchester.
2. August: Bar 1:22, Huddersfield
3. August: The Dublin Castle, Camden, London
4. August: The Hope Pub, Brighton

Here is the Facebook, Bandcamp, and Website for Violent Vickie.

summr samplr + concerts in erfurt and berlin

summer music, 2013, free download, free music, berlin music, music berlin, berlin bands, you're only massive

We have some gigs coming up and so decided to release a
free music summr samplr of six tracks, old and new!

Right click –> –> HERE to download the zip file with 6 mp3s.
We hope you enjoy listening and dancing!
If you like what you hear, our vinyl records and mp3 downloads are available here: shop

Upcoming concerts:

  • Freitag, 19th July, 10pm, Erfurt.

Polyfantasiaball as part of the polyfantasia woche 2013

  • Saturday 10th August, Berlin.

as part of (ex best) friends fest, at bei ruth, ziegrastr.11-13, Neukölln.
This is a smoke-free event with eight bands:

starting at 3pm. with food, cake and haircuts. It is sad that the wonderful ex-best friends are calling it a day, but this will be a beautiful kiss-off. See you there.

xo

Midi Grrrl

Postcards from Ireland!

Hi there! I’m in Ireland, where I’ve visited a potential location for the girls* rock! Ireland music project in Dublin, been chilling with my family in Waterford and been getting to know the newest member of the family in Cork. Not to mention the fact that John, Dave’s dad, was featured singer at the singers club in Cork on Sunday. I think you could call this a summer holiday as the weather has been fantastic – just wish I had gotten to see some grrrlfriends too. Here are a few snaps! Xo

P.S. back to Berlin tomorrow – and then we are getting ready to play Antifee in Göttingen on Saturday 8th June, on the same night as some bands like Respect My Fist (band crush alert), Jolly Goods and Crime! It’s gonna be the bomb!

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An interview with Paper Dollhouse

Astrud and Nina are from London, and make music as Paper Dollhouse. They first played in Berlin in 2011. (Full disclosure: the concert took place in our bomb-shelter recording studio, and we are going to release a recording of it soon.)

They returned in December to play a packed out concert at Madam Claude in Kreuzberg, and I was very privileged to interview them while shopping for records the day after the gig.

Paper Dollhouse’s first album is out now on Finder’s Keepers,

and their new e.p. is available from Chapel Yard Records.

How did you meet? How did you begin performing together?

Nina:  We met about fifteen years ago through a mutual friend. I remember the day clearly, we had a sophisticated dinner party and listened to our friend Sophie’s mum’s Frank Sinatra vinyl collection! But we were 16 and Astrud had pink hair and I had the same hair as now! We became close friends only about four years ago.

I started doing stuff with Liberez and John Hannon had been recording the Rayographs album which is how Astrud knew him. The Rayographs came to our shows and Astrud told me she was going to poach me for Paper Dollhouse.

Then a few days later I had a really vivid and beautiful dream that she came to my house with a small potted plant in her hands and offered it to me, when I took it, fire was falling from the sky and then a very heavy rain. I then knew that we would make music together. We started hanging out more and more and so it all began…

  Astrud: I don’t remember this meeting at all but I do remember listening to a lot of 60s easy listening and garage on Damaged Goods and Teenage Shutdown, stuff like that.

Our friend Sophie was into it- she’s a very chic lady. We starting watching loads of French films and wearing scarves and stuff. There’s an amazing band called The Pebbles who had a song called “We’re Going Shopping” which is ace. Yeah we met again years later coincidentally. John showed me a film of Nina doing some spoken word things for Liberez while we were in the studio.

I think they might have used it as part of a set where Nina was a virtual presence, and I thought it looked so striking and unaffected. We went to Dungeness to take some polaroids for Rayographs- Nina had this old polaroid camera and the photos came out so wicked and ghosted due to the age of the film, Dark psyche.

We started sharing ideas a lot after that. Words, ideas, images, thoughts, came a long time before the music. The first album is predominantly acoustic, recorded in my house and garden. Sonically, Nina is in it very subtly but she is a strong presence in the album and took loads of photos of the garden, my house, walks we took, which in some ways informed it, or definitely provided an equal and opposite parallel visual world. It was all the same paradigm and a very creative, bright, special time

 

 

Your live performances are very formal and ritual-like, yet also unselfconscious. How did you develop this?

 

Nina: I think it’s a combination of two factors; of consciously wanting the performance to be a complete performance in itself without any distractions, like theater, like a kind of meditative experience but also I suppose the way we perform is completely natural to our work together and I don’t think we could do it any other way, it would not feel right. Our performances and stage sets are thought out as far as visuals, light and atmosphere and I think these things are important for the kind of sound we are performing. Our stage is always very dark with glimmers of light from the film or the instruments. We are often in shadow and very still while playing even if the beat is fast.

 

Astrud: I find the process of performing pretty meditative and trancelike in some ways. I’m a pretty cerebral person and prefer to project the dynamics and ideas of performance through visuals and scopic sound. It’s the way I feel I can best channel whatever it is I’m saying. I’d really like to develop the visual set up. I always have a lot of crazy ideas about how to produce a more theatrical presence like live theatre, but so it’s not too schlocky. I think if all the details stick out and are obvious it creates distance and consciousness about detail so you are not fully absorbed into the experience.

I think if it’s done well, the set, music, visuals, the whole environment is sublimated into one cocoon of sound, light and ideas rather than picking out individual features.  I saw Haxan Cloak play a brutal set last year with a massive strobe and ear-assault and heavy bass. Was amazing and violently hypnotic. I think this is why I like a lot of minimal dark techno due to its hypnotic qualities.

Probably to tame thought and remould it in a different realm.

 

Memories and dreams are often themes in your songs, but there are also several cinematic references. To what extent are your songs autobiographical?

 

Astrud (L) and Nina (R) from Paperdoll House buying records in Kreuzberg, Berlin in December 2012.

Astrud (L) and Nina (R) from Paper doll House buying records in Kreuzberg, Berlin in December 2012.

Nina: I think to some extent it is inevitable that lyrics are personal. We are equally influenced by dreams, memory, reality, our personal and collective experiences, cinema and folklore.

 

Astrud: I can only write from my own mind and from my own experience, because even if I wrote about someone else it would be my version or projection of their reality, channeled through a filter where my influence and experience has coloured it.

For me, there’s no separation between sound, language and imagery. Music can generate imagery, silent photos of nothingness sometimes generate an entire spoken word thing I my head as can some music or really white powerful sun distorting your consciousness.

 

 The first time I saw you play, your setup was a lot more primitive. You were using children’s toys, plastic-pipes and acoustic guitars to make your music.This time Nina is playing the synthesiser, and Astrud is playing the electric guitar. Does this reflect the future direction of your sound?

 

Nina: Yes, we are starting to experiment a lot more with electronics, synth sounds, programming beats and using effects. The sound will of course keep developing and evolving, the record we are working on now is a lot different to the first Paper Dollhouse record. For us it is very exciting and we want to learn, get better at our instruments and make new sounds. The essence of Paper Dollhouse will always be there, the music will always be informed by the things we love and are influenced by, but I think the sound is becoming less ambient and more electronic/dark pop which is nice.

 

Astrud: Definitely. At the beginning we were doing stuff so embryonically, in contrast to the volume and whole sound of Rayographs; we did it in pockets. It was like faint sketches, as is the first album in some ways. It was an embraced choice connected to the level of technicality we had at the time and an appreciation of technological naivety and simplicity.

It was very very bare but limited in that essence. In learning how to work with samplers, synths and vocal pedals we can create a much more enveloping world in a way I’ve been interested for a while.

I listen to a lot of deep, ambient electronic stuff and wanted to match that aesthetic more bit by bit. Not to copy, to reappropriate some of the sounds. It’s a way to learn and it’s always evolving.

Your label, Finders Keepers, is known for putting out reissues and forgotten classics. How do Paper Dollhouse fit in alongside albums like “Dracula’s Music Cabinet” and “Bollywood Bloodbath”?

 

NinaI love the weird and wonderful Finders Keepers film soundtrack releases, world music reissues and compilations.

Recently I’ve been listening to Life is Dance which is music from Pakistani films from the 60s and 70s, it’s so so good. I have this idea to do a compilation of Bosnian metal haha.

I think that would be really cool.

 

Astrud: I love the eclecticism, aesthetic and approach of the label; I used to work at Pias who distribute it and got into it when I worked there. I collected lots of their catalogue before Paper Dollhouse was signed to Bird to I was totally gushing when they offered to put stuff out.

Of course our sound is not similar to those releases but I still love them. I have a big love for soundtracks especially for odder films and the Paperhouse connection shows that.

I’m pretty sure Paper sound is a lot darker than some of the other stuff but Finders Keepers are incredibly inclusive both musically and personally and I really value that.

 

 

Your song “Daisies” is absolutely fantastic. The lyrics are very vivid. What was your inspiration for it?

 

Astrud: It’s a reference to the film Daisies, which features two girls on a vivid journey of fun via Czech new wave film techniques and cool bedrooms.

As much as it felt like the making of our music is like this, that song is more ambiguous. It signifies an independence which relates to the story in the film. It’s a bit of a fucked up nursery rhyme.

All nursery rhymes are fucked up. And all lessons.

 

Nina: I agree. I could watch that film every day, it’s so cool and rich visually and metaphorically. Most European films that were banned around that era are interesting because they are provocative or ground breaking in some way

Paperdoll House Setlist from Madame Claude.

Paper Dollhouse setlist from Madame Claude.

There are some tracks on the album where the lyrics are spoken.

Do you distinguish between poetry and song lyrics?

 

Nina: I think for me there’s a fine line. I think having worked with Liberez in a completely experimental way I am very much influenced by and interested in that discipline.

Although I love lyrics I am always inclined to want to edit heavily and experiment with the voice as an instrument rather than for singing as such. I am interested in voices and especially the speaking voice and like to use my own voice in that way.

I think our voices work well together, they have different qualities and they naturally want to go against each other which can be really nice.

We’ve started sampling vocals live- capturing voices on a recorder to later use live or putting a dictaphone through the microphone just to build up texture, it’s nice to sometimes work in simple ways like that.

 

Astrud: When I started writing songs years ago they were a little more formal but however hard I try to stick to a terrain they always become these mental puzzles which seem to make perfect sense and zero in on a purist emotive and visual essence that would be impossible to generate in ordinary sentences.

That’s what’s so powerful about song lyrics, they can intensely resonate. Poetry can do this but it’s to do with the brain latching onto verse and that complicated verse is tricky to deliver effectively within a song. I started writing lyrics in Rayographs then moved on to edited them in my head with sounds so they became more free form.

I try both I guess. Sometimes they just come out as they are which is why some don’t make sense or aren’t in fact actual words. If lyrics made complete sense you probably wouldn’t remember them in the same way. And the words i write always make total sense to me.

I know what they’re about, even if I didn’t fully at the time.

 

 

Paper Dollhouse’s first album is out now on Finder’s Keepers, and their new e.p. is available from Chapel Yard Records.