Mun Sing (aka Harry from Giant Swan) will present his debut LP, the remarkable ‘Inflatable Gravestone’ just released on Planet Mu at Panke on Thursday 15th June. A juddering blend of cyber grime and deconstructed dub, tempered with humour and introspection, it’s hard and heavy all round. Joining will be dub-pop trio Jabu, a long awaited Berlin return for the raucous rhythm playmaker Akiko Haruna and the Ukraine raised, Berlin based pop polymath Odarka.
The motivating force of Wright’s album is the sudden loss of Harry’s father in 2020. Their father struggled with substance addiction and the album explores ideas of ‘spirituality’ and the ‘higher self’ in relation to addiction and its parallels with the coping mechanisms of grief. It also aims to highlight the importance of humour and distraction when coping with loss.
The album is largely built around club-centred tracks (such as ‘Spider’ and ’Squabble’) broken up by moments of yearning and reflection in tracks like ’The Poison Garden’ and ‘Helhest (Azrael Smirks)’ and moments of dark anguish in ‘Inheritor’ with its heavy slab-like chords and pensive piano. Flirting with awkward and suggestive rhythms, Wright deliberately suspends moments of resolution and groove in favour of drama and jerky, unexpected cartoonish humour, taking as much influence from the likes of the Art Of Noise as Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.
The core Jabu trio of producer Amos Childs and vocalists Jasmine Butt and Alex Rendall draw inspiration from the voidal bliss-outs of shoegaze (AR Kane’s amniotic dream-pop epic 69 is one influence cited) and the space-time disturbances of dub, commanding both a raindrops-on-cobwebs delicacy and an immense, oceanic pressure.
Fluent in the rules of music, dance and mixed-media composition, Akiko Haruna is able to bend and break disciplines with her productions. Her playground of sonic talents include being a skilled pianist, vocalist, sound designer and previously trained violinist and flautist. A graduate of Digital Music & Sound Arts, her practice involves a combination of dance and movement with sonic constructions.
Odarka is a Ukrainian electronic musician and vocalist, born in Minsk, raised in Kyiv and currently based in Berlin. By weaving her poetry and rhythmically narrated Ukrainian and English texts into tender and bursting layers of synthesizers, she observes the war and multiple issues that are hidden within its past and its present, outside and within it, she reflects on it through her memory, through empathy and imagination, sensitivity and consciousness, fury and acceptance, she offers you the sound that contains it all, you just need to look, to listen, and to trust.
MSE! w/ Mun Sing (Planet Mu / Giant Swan) / Jabu (Young Echo) / Akiko Haruna (Numbers) / Odarka
Thursday, 15.6.2023 | Doors 20:00 | Starts 21:00 CET
Panke Culture | Gerichtstraße 23 in 13347 Berlin-Wedding
