LAKE FELIX is the highly optimistic name for an itchy-guitar-driven, bumpy try to turn the puddle of all the wayward, ugly creatures, that one can be, to a deep and clear watered lake of shiny little fishes. It’s the name of a berlin-based one-WOMAN-band , making sometimes more epic, sometimes more psychedelic-electronic colored folk-punk-rock, backed by loops of sounds, beats, guitar- and voicescapes and scraps of human being. Loops on guitar and vocals create a rich and sometimes terrifying choir, displaying about every intense notion that a human heart can bear without discarding.
Facts
1: Things fall down.
2: Everyone dies.
3: Nobody wants to be alone.
Questions
1.What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Everything peculiar: the language, behavior, music, art overall of those people, whose homogenization efforts fail. All these edges, nooks, bumps, mistakes, contretemps and obvious needinesses. And the biggest inspiration are probably my own flaws, that I manically try to establish. (Here it strikes me, that this is actually the principle of gentrification, see how deep my socialization in this city roots.)
2.How and when did you get into making music?
Serious and passionate I started at the age of about 14. on a special music boarding high school. My Mother put me in the music class on trial and borrowed a guitar for me. Since this music thing sparked quite immediately, after I got this autonomizing instrument, with what I could write songs with my first 3 chords, I got a guitar I could keep. I could do the opposite of the children choir’s boring repertoire, I was in before. At this time I started my own stuff and playing in the first band s.
3.What are your 5 favorite albums of all time?
DEUS: Worst Case Scenario
THE PIXIES: Doolittle
RADIOHEAD: From Hail to the Thief
TOCOTRONIC: K.O.O.K.
SOAP AND SKIN: Lovetune for Vacuum
There are some more I could tell. So this is just an extract, not the 5 best.
4.What do you associate with Berlin?
Hard to tell, what I associate with the city, where I was born and where I grew up in, a city, that have been changing continuously and still does.
Currently and since a while it might be the local „Stammtischthema“ gentrification: and not just the housing market thing, which is probably the worst and most existential part of it, but also on the cultural level. It looks like everything in this city, that starts with being just there in an anarchic and natural way, has to become something exploitable. Any coincidence and peculiarity that happens here, is or will be realized and reproduced to something buyable.
At the same time I still feel, that it’s a kind of stubborn city, it seems that you can at least not easily just recapitalize everything away. It’s somehow both: an arrogant, blabbing city full of soap bubbles and on the other hand , stubborn, unpretentious, crooked, unimpressed hiking it’s shoulders, saying: „Dit geht ooch wieder vorbei.“. Anyway it’s still the most various city I know, with cultural niches for a lot of different people, but how many cities do I know?
5.What’s your favorite place in your town?
There are so many. Müggelberge, Müggelturm und -see, Plänterwald, there are a lot of corners in Wedding, Weissensee und Lichtenberg, Schöneweide that I like, a fistfull of beautiful parks. Sowjetdenkmal, jüdischer Friedhof and I’m sure there are lots of places that I still don’t know yet.
6.If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
Get children and /or do more writing and social work.
7. What was the last record/music you bought?
To be honest, I don’t remember.
8.Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I already thought about participating the Band Kulku or to play with Sebastian Cleemann (aka Petula), concerning Berlin based band s.
9.What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
Hard to answer that, since all the concerts I played have been so different. As simple as it is, what pleased me the most, were these rare shows, where people actually danced to my sometimes called heavy or bulky music.
10.How important is technology to your creative process?
Pretty fundamental. The Lake Felix Project accrued out of technical conditions and limits, especially the limits and how to fight them are a big part of it. You must be creative, to make your solo project sounding the way, you hear it in your head, where you have this loyal, dutiful and weird imaginary band and it turned out to be racing game.
11.Do you have siblings and how do they feel about your career?
I have 6 brothers and I differ from them not only concerning my gender, also our life concepts are strongly different. But since the precarious living with and because of a big need for expression is not a concept, but just something that is a part of me, they take it as it is. At least one of them secretly finds my pretty cool for that, I think.
Link: Soundcloud | Band camp
