Sophia Kennedy Monarch Berlin 2017

Hot on the heels of her fantastic new album “Monsters” on City Slang, Sophia Kennedy comes to Berlin next month for a special outdoor show in the garden at Festsaal Kreuzberg.

Sophia Kennedy’s music sometimes sounds like a soundtrack to world to disintegrating, hanging on by a thread of memories, it combines the glamour and the morbid charm of tin pan alley show tunes from the 1960s or 70s and yet it fully embraces the deconstructed modernism of club music. The songs can change the atmosphere in a split second, impressively illustrated by last year’s single “Orange Tic Tac” which switched between threatening gloomy trap beats and soothing crooner melodies.

Her sophomore album Monsters, to be released May 7th on City Slang, is full of plot twists, moments of prettiness dashed with paranoia. The title itself, is a self-ironic, comic-like commentary of being an artist trying to tame own creations like “monsters” gone wild but also a nod to a generally threatening tension in the world. Monsters is pop music teetering on the verge of ruin but it’s not a eulogy, it’s a Tear Down Party!

<a href="https://sophiakennedy.bandcamp.com/album/monsters">Monsters by Sophia Kennedy</a>

Kennedy’s creative approach has always been unusual. Growing up in Germany after her family emigrated from Baltimore, she developed an ear for off-centred songcraft picking through her mum’s record collection: Whitney Houston and Simon & Garfunkel at first, Karen Dalton and the Velvet Underground later. With no equipment to hand, she started recording audio on a camcorder, given to her on her sixteenth’s Birthday, blurring the lines between music and her other passion, film.

She’d video herself singing and playing the piano, and would later process the sounds into something close to a pop song. “It was a weird way of producing music, because I didn’t know how to record myself,” she remembers. “Then, I just carried the camera with me wherever I went, documenting practically my whole life, sitting at the piano, writing Songs and making weird little soundscapes and voice-overs for my own little films. Maybe that is why my music sometimes seems to have this kind of cinematic approach.”