Nein Flower is the debut album from the newly formed duo of David “Nein Rodere” Roeder and Lila “Nowhere Flower” Jarzombek - a textural and instinctive work assembled through DIY 4-track recording techniques, tape manipulation, damaged acoustics and meticulous layering of composed and improvisational passages.
Emerging from parallel histories within improvisational and experimental music and visual art scenes of their respective Berlin and Portland hometowns, Nein Flower is the result of Jarzombek and Roeder's free-flowing yet matter-of-fact songwriting sensibility and fractured approach to instrumentation. Drawing from shared influences including the rustic folk traditions of Robbie Basho, Crescent’s bare-bones Electronic Sound Constructions, The Tower Recordings’ most decayed moments and the hallucinatory explorations of Letha Melchior Rodman, song and atmosphere blur into a dense yet approachable palette that would have found solace in Volcanic Tongue’s storied “pop” section. "I think something that's meant to be shared should always reach a hand to its audience, even if it's just an imaginary one", reflects Roeder.
The influence of both artists' painting backgrounds seep into the album, though in a decidedly informal way. Composition and layering during the writing process could be considered akin to daubing layers of an altered landscape - shifting scenes and disappearing environments obscured by murk and hazed by memory. But it was always the rough and naive art of children and the untrained that Jarzombek was most captivated by - a joy in experimentation that she would be exposed to again in Providence's fertile noise scene. "I love music where the approach to the guitar is free of frills", she reflects, as her intimate, delicately adorned strum sets the scene for Roeder to take the stage and channel literary heroes Pessoa and Walser. Roeder’s sensuous yet conversational tone narrates the absurd and conjures the surreal from the quotidian - and perhaps there also lies a nod to wandering the streets of 21th century Berlin, the city's loneliness, grit and greys exposed like the degraded tape hiss, clipped signals and textural sonic debris.
Nein Flower is both artists' first outing for A Colourful Storm and follows prolific periods. Jarzombek’s solo work has appeared through Stefan Christensen’s C/Site Recordings, Digital Regress and the longstanding Post Present Medium, while Roeder issued a string of recent releases through Horn of Plenty, a collaborative album with Cooper Bowman of Troth, and has appeared on micro editions, both solo and as part of the improvisational trio Primitive Structures. A Colourful Storm is proud to present the work of a duo sharing a language of intuitive, exploratory songwriting, unafraid to test new waters. The result is music that feels intimate and beautifully weathered.
