MASHA QRELLA - Unsolved Remained

Many years have passed since Berlin was the city of angels, where Lou Reed, Brian Eno and David Bowie walked, lived and breathed ether. And yet Berlin remains the city where everything springs up spontaneously.

It is the place where past and present become an uneven compound, a kaleidoscope of differences, in which time and space generate constant voids. Unplanned spaces that open up like wounds, from which the most vital blood flows.

And it is precisely in this city, dominated by a striking sense of disorientation, that Masha Qrella's work takes shape. From a very young age she's been an active part of the German capital's music scene, which for years has championed avant-garde pop and synth-electronica.

A multi-instrumentalist, she has worked with no fewer than three bands - Contriva, Mina and NM Farmer - playing guitar, bass and keyboards, and already bringing her extremely fragile voice close to repeated, decaying sounds in some tracks. What shaped her as an artist isn't just the aforementioned collaborations, but certainly also having been a backing member of key bands on the Nineties alternative scene, such as Stereolab and Sonic Youth.

In 2002 the small indie label Monika released her first solo album, titled "Luck": a collection of eleven wholly spontaneous songs that immediately stand out for their fresh simplicity.

An indie-pop album, called by some the best of 2002.

But beyond labels, what's striking about this album is young Qrella's ability to move the listener's soul through the simplicity of stretched-out, repeated sounds, percussive loops and shy vocal hints, with which she tells small stories of life and love, delivering melodies that go straight to the head, then linger in the room until fading into silences that play just as large a part in shaping the album.

After the debut album comes "Unsolved Remained", released by the prestigious Morr Music label, on which the hand of production becomes far more explicit. A more constructed album, yet still nourished by essential minimalism and the courage to lay bare the fragility of its exquisitely pop songs, always poised between folk and electronica, but with deeply introspective content.

The beauty of the album lies precisely in this duality, in the temporal patience needed to grasp the beauty of certain effects. It is, in fact, a more complex album, less spontaneous than its predecessor, but one that holds multiple layers of interpretation within it.

Unexpected cuts crop up everywhere. The songs are at times quite classic, at least in their opening sections, but then surprisingly embrace new geometries and dissonant textures that carry with them all the joy of being discovered.

What leaves you slightly disoriented is that the surprise effect is entrusted to brilliant mistakes and gaps.

She says it herself: "Because personally, I find it pleasant when something isn't perfectly understandable, when something doesn't announce itself outright but instead reveals itself through other things, since I believe that way something extra stays with you, more than when a track is flawless."

"Unsolved Remained" closely resembles the beauty of the city where it was born.

From the very first listen, you're struck by the hints, the rises and falls, the silences and restless noises of broken synthesizers, as if the contrasting skyline of the metropolis — that metropolis — were being sketched out in real time.

So we move from the dreamy voice mixed with technology and the familiar hybrid of guitar and electronics in "Unsolved Remained" to the ballad "Sister, Welcome", which shines on guitar strings and builds itself around her diaphanous voice, before shifting to more mechanical, electronic pieces like "No Matter", or trip-hop numbers like "Guided By The Stripes", with a touch of stomach-tightening blues.

There's no shortage of tracks poised between folk and pop, such as "Last Night" and "My Day", or the small gem "Feels Like".

You have to wait for tracks 8 and 9 to reach the sharpest contrasts, not just musical ones, as in "Everything Shows", where the creeping sound is broken open by the synthesizer, but physical ones too, since in "Destination Vertical", a Rechenzentrum track, the dance-pop sonorities pull you into irresistible movement.

And it feels this way every time you slot this record back into the player (because this is one of those albums that demands repeated listens): like wandering the grey streets of Berlin, turning a corner and feeling the cold, stepping into a courtyard and being struck by bold primary colours, vanishing into a vast square surrounded by skyscrapers, descending underground and finding life there, walking with no fixed destination but discovering, each time, new and utterly unexpected details.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

30/04/2026