When the earth shook in Istanbul in April last year, so the story goes, Anadol and Marie Klock met in a park, spent the day in a safe place – and the writer’s block the latter had been enduring was gone. That earthly problems of this kind should befall an artist like Klock may seem hard to imagine. Listening to her sometimes crashing chanson-pop songs from a parallel world, one might assume she could turn any idea into an even larger one.
This is where Anadol comes in, with her kaleidoscopic, psychedelic approach: the perfect playground for music only moderately interested in what everyone else is doing. Their second album together once again moves between genre stools, bubbling and warping, drawing playful, clattering sounds lightly from keyboards and electric organs that, in their hands, almost seem like toys.
In the German-language anti-lullaby »Henri«, we listen in on the mother of all anti-conversations: »How are you? It’ll have to do.« »Rentrer à la maison« tells of the uncomfortable feeling of not being allowed to call one’s home home. Elsewhere, Klock speak-sings about what a loaf of bread really has to tell us, but as so often with her, the space between the lines gives plenty away. One can call all this leftfield or quirky or whimsical on Manivelles. But that only brings one closer to the two musicians. In any case, it is magnificent.
