VV.AA. - Monika Werkstatt

Shall we talk about the women of Ingmar Bergman – muses and genuine protagonists of the theater of life? Figures carved out, almost always in close-up or extreme close-up, strong and resolute girls who take their lives into their own hands, mothers and daughters pained yet full of dignity, sacrificial victims of insolent partners who are themselves just as fragile.

What comes through in the Swedish master's films is perhaps the most spontaneous and evident form of gender equality, even if it doesn't fail to reveal a pronounced predilection for female character and expressiveness.

The cover of this project celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Monika Enterprise label, run by electronic musician and committed feminist Gudrun Gut (who originally named the label in memory of a pet goldfish), is dedicated to one of these heroines – the magnetic Harriet Andersson of "Summer with Monika". Almost the entire output of the label is centered on the work of women musicians, in response to the scant attention paid by a record industry that, at every level, has never done much to abolish the gender divisions that still prevail.

The workshop (werkstatt) is a practice that Gut herself has chosen to carry forward over the years together with her collaborators. In the summer of 2016 this creative dimension reached a decisive chapter with the gathering of ten artists in Uckermark, in a studio set in the countryside outside Berlin: here an environment took shape in which to share every aspect of daily life and experiment collectively to find new and unexpected expressive solutions.

Alongside Gudrun, the participants included AGF, Beate Bartel, Natalie "Tba" Beridze, Lucrecia Dalt, Danielle De Picciotto, Islaja, Pilocka Krach, Barbara Morgenstern and Sonae: they worked face to face for three days, recording and improvising in close contact, before reworking their individual pieces and finishing production on their own.

Inevitably, then, "Monika Werkstatt" stands as a kind of feminist manifesto, though its quiet assertion rests not on ideological premises but solely on the work of its protagonists, voices from a decidedly varied scene still largely waiting to be discovered.

Alongside historic greats like AGF and Morgenstern – among the leading "singer-songwriters" of the digital era – come welcome returns and pleasant revelations: from the post-industrial wasteland of Lucrecia Dalt ("Blindholes") to the sensual, elusive dreaminess of Beate Bartel ("Feuerland", "M.B.T."), from the soft ambient-techno of Sonae ("Between Two Worlds") to the brazen beat of the sardonic "Who's Afraid of Justin Bieber?" by Pilocka Krach (otherwise balanced and sensitive in the keyboard interlude "Sternhagen"); somewhat more tied to an Eighties legacy are matriarch Gut's synth-music and Danielle De Picciotto's post-kraut explorations, while Islaja's measured folktronica takes on almost Lynchian hues.

The final side of the double-LP edition presents eight tracks that ideally represent the successive stages of a kind of jam session credited to the entire workshop, and which for that very reason stands as the most frenzied and corrosive moment of the collection, amid obsessive rhythms, glitch-noise infiltrations and a spoken passage that serves as the key to reading the whole project: If I am invisible to you, then you cannot see me [...] you cannot control me [...] you cannot influence me [...] you cannot manipulate me [...] I can do as I please.

"Monika Werkstatt" thus becomes an unequivocal declaration of independence, as well as an invitation to build a global network of women artists aimed at spreading their respective output and fueling the growing interest of the underground audience in their work.

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

27/06/2017