FRANKIE & KELMAN DURAN - McArthur

There's an imaginary line connecting the tropical aesthetic of Los Angeles' McArthur Park with the Neo-Romanesque architecture of the Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche (literally "Church of the XII Apostles") in Berlin's Schöneberg district. Two spaces diametrically opposed in concept and history, yet both have somehow inspired the nine tracks of "McArthur", the debut album by the duo made up of German composer and singer FRANKIE, born Franziska Aigner, and Dominican-American DJ and producer Kelman Duran, who, among other things, contributed significantly to Renaissance by Beyoncé, specifically on the tracks "I'm That Girl" and "HEATED", as well as to the score of Lola Quivoron's film "Rodeo". The two met in 2022 within the walls of the German evangelical cathedral and gradually embarked on a damn peculiar path, inaugurated with "preghiera" and continued through a fruitful exchange of scores and sketches, via further meetings in both Athens and Los Angeles.

"McArthur" is born, however, from something deeper: a search for the self within what Duran tends to call a "negative space", inside which improvised jazz and machine-shredded fragments can be wrapped in deconstructed club form from time to time, as the elusive "SLINKY" makes clear, moving between cicadas, piano melodies and a children's choir that Kubrick himself would have coveted, before the trumpet of Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches tears through everything else.

Cursed fire and holy water: "McArthur" holds together many opposing elements. "BWV 639" is in fact a reworking of a Bach cantata, performed for the occasion by pianist Iris Moldiz, who recorded her part at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. It's a spectral ballad sung by a kind of possessed angel as it helplessly watches its own inner big crunch. And then there's Aigner's cello, dressed in ecclesiastical garb, pairing with searing percussion on "Techno 127 BPM" or on the opening (and twin) track "GRAYT", whose accompanying video, made in collaboration with Enad Marouf and Margarita Maximova, revolves around unsettling choreography framed by a lo-fi backdrop.

"We're on a journey toward something, yet we choose not to arrive": that's the narrative and thematic concept of an album, part Kerouac and part Proust, in which the initial approach to the sacred is continually profaned.

So, dissonance and stasis. There's precisely a calm chaos, to borrow Veronesi's phrase, that reigns supreme here and there, even when, as on "Medicine", the only aim is, quite simply, to recount the end of a long relationship, conjured up like an exorcism, on a track produced by Duran at Warp Studio, which, fittingly enough, overlooks McArthur Park.

With "McArthur", FRANKIE & Kelman Duran bring to life a surreal dance, in which experimental electronics and free-jazz inserts collide like protons along that fateful stretch, laid out at the outset, that metaphorically links the Berlin church and the Los Angeles park. In between lie emotional shadow zones and religious surges, stirring up demons and saints in one of the most intriguing debuts of the year so far.

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01/02/2026