Tellavision and Alex St Joan at Urban Spree / Tuesday 07.05.2019

AmStart presents an excellent double release concert at Urban Spree in Friedrichshain this May with Tellavision celebrating “Add Land” on Bureau B and ALEX ST JOAN celebrating the new record “Kick & Rise” on Zellephan Records.

TELLAVISION: for a decade Tellavision has been one of our most exciting sonic inventors, carving out her own inimitable style through her previous three albums, two EPs and countless tracks. New music abstractions echo against a backdrop of old Krautrock mechanical-motorik rhythms, allied to the physically gripping immediacy of techno and noise.

Her concerts have consistently been nothing less than spectacular: she has sung and sampled beats from every imaginable and unimaginable variety of live percussion instruments; a loop station virtuoso, an engineer of a technically crafted musical “i” in which the innate and the alien mirror one another ad infinitum. Tellavision has never sounded so immediate, so confident, so very much in the moment. This is her finest album to date: “Drop utopia, / drop dystopia, / it’s all here”.

ALEX ST JOAN: debut EP “KICK & RISE” (Zellephan) features 4 distinctive songs that discard the posturing of youth and lay down what it is to be an adult; vulnerable and fully accountable. Whether using fractured synth-saxophones to hammer out a paean to self-determination or building a song around a heartbeat, ALEX ST JOAN is not taking the easy way out. “All of the things that you see as your failings are made up” is a contender for one of the most emotionally sharp lines of the year, yet it’s delivered with such hopeful romanticism one might be forgiven for not noticing the thorns amongst the flowers. These are adult dilemmas; not boy meets girl but woman meets morality, agency, self-actualisation. In merely 4 songs, ALEX ST JOAN builds a framework for us to face our fears, ask the tough questions and then let them go.