Frank Möbus

KUU! - Arificial SheepCD / digital Jelena vocals Kalle Kalima guitar & bass Frank Möbus guitar Christian Lillinger drums The widespread positive response to “Lampedusa Lullaby”, KUU!’s 2018 label debut on ACT also gave rise to enthusiastic, imaginative and telling descriptions of the band’s music: “An alchemically complex jazz punk alloy. […] Really rather wonderful.”( PROG magazine). “A raw, thorny mixture of punk attitude, electro- dance elements, eccentric fusion, and free jazz outbursts.” (All About Jazz). These plaudits drew attention to perhaps the most remarkable, unexpected, maybe even paradoxical thing about KUU! (it means ‘moon’ in Finnish): that this unique quartet of singer Jelena Kuljić, two guitarists Kalle Kalima and Frank Möbus, and drums/percussion Christian Lillinger always find ways to combine powerful attitude, in-your-face political engagement, and even occasional white-hot rage, with astonishingly and consistently high levels of musicality, musical interest and a kind of creativity which is capable of taking the band off in many different directions. This is indeed a group of superb musicians who have been honing their craft on stage together for most of a decade. And while all four of them – understatement! – have multiple commitments to all kinds of other activities, KUU! is something which they want to commit themselves and their time to, and which they all palpably enjoy: "Basically, we just want to play,” says says Kalle Kalima, “good concerts with this band are complete bliss." And Jelena Kuljić adds: "When we play, it's pure heaven." And now Corona. The pandemic has faced this band - and its four members who put so much of their energy and considerable craft into it - with a problem: how to keep KUU! progressing, how not to stand still, but to achieve it without having the normal context of live performance. In essence their work was moved into their home studios in Munich and Berlin. And what is remarkable about the album “Artificial Sheep” is how successfully they have managed to relearn everything and to make it instinctive: the communication between them, their processes, the way in which thematic material flows into the lyrics, beats, rhythmic interweaving, the sounds and the energy-producing friction of their strong personalities. And above all their ability to create and to hold the atmosphere. The world of “Artificial Sheep” is haunting and unsettling. A dystopian future is very present and very real here. And rather than imagining the future, there is a particular immediacy because the world of Blade Runner has suddenly become much more like the everyday in 2021: paranoia, control, power and mistrust, the wholesale deceit of the world, environmental destruction, humans versus robots ...Here we are in the world of the 1982 cult film with Harrison Ford, which was based on the 1968 Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”; the album title “Artificial Sheep” is derived directly from that book. Challenging questions of what is reality and what is just perception or fake are there, right from the very first line of the first song: “It’s easier to believe fiction than real life.” And in the song “Officer kd 6-3.7”, this develops into riddles about who or what is human and what is cyber: “I am not a program. I don’t know if I can feel it.” In this dark, claustrophobic world where conspiracy theories and manipulation prevail, human relationships are tense. Jelena Kuljić launches herself particularly powerfully into the domain of gender politics in a compelling tour de force in “Miss Stress”. If Kuljić in the past has been compared to Nina Hagen, then the focus, intent and sheer force of personality she finds here are such as to leave those memories and comparisons way behind. There are also cover versions of songs by Arcade Fire (“My Body is a Cage”) and the Beastie Boys (“Sabotage”, underpinned by some magnificent powerhouse drumming). And in the powerful final song, “Book of Nihil”, with a lyric co-written by the members of the band, there is a particularly menacing juxtaposition of the threats from Darwinian natural selection combined with the sinister commandments to conform to social norms from ‘Jante's Law’ by the Danish novelist Aksel Sandemose. We find ourselves in a strange world of harmonic uncertainty and anonymity, and the album ends eerily as if its life support has suddenly been cut off. Musicians tend to know when they’ve done something that is genuinely out of the ordinary. Kalle Kalima describes “Artifical Sheep as "one of the most awesome things I've ever done". The strange worlds of the imagination which this album inhabits, and the persuasi-veness of the musical language which KUU! have found to take us there are unforgettable. Far from having their senses dulled by the pandemic, these musicians have seen them reinvigorated and reanimated. And that is the most unexpected and engaging paradox of “Artificial Sheep”.Credits: Recorded at Hansa Studios Berlin 19.02. - 21.02. & 17.08. - 18.08.2020 Engineers: Nanni Johansson & Klaus Scheuermann Assistants: Frida Claeson Johansson & Yun Chu Liang Mixed and mastered by Klaus Scheuermann Produced by KUU! The Art in Music: Cover art by Gabriel Orozco, Untitled, 2018 - 2019, courtesy Gallery Kurimanzutto, New York /Mexico City

KUU! - Lampedusa LullabyCD/ vinyl / digitalJelena Kuljić vocals Kalle Kalima guitar Frank Möbus guitar Christian Lillinger drums KUU!’s songs are so well honed, they have a way of emotionally hitting the spot, and also staying lodged in the mind. The reason why this band has been making such waves in Germany is the special chemistry between the artists, combined with a sixth sense and an urgency about the way they communicate. The band members – Kalle Kalima, Frank Möbus (both on guitars) with drummer Christian Lillinger – are never short of creative ideas, and they form a strong yet supple understructure for the phenomenally expressive singer Jelena Kuljić. Kuljić was born in 1976 in Serbia, and left her home country after the civil war. She had started out as a young impetuous punk, then studied jazz singing in Berlin, where she became an established presence and built a reputation on the scene. She has a parallel career as an actress, and is now a member of the ensemble at the Münchner Kammerspiele. As a vocalist, she has unbelievable energy. To call her a force of nature is certainly no overstatement. She can focus with the directness of a beam of light, and she knows how to hover in the space close to the core of what really matters. As a performer she has authenticity, and makes the messages she conveys not just comprehensible and believable but also unavoidable. The lyrics are thematically diverse, tending to be based on powerful commentaries on the times we live in. The surreal, the utopian and on occasion the comic characterize her poetry, but Jelena Kuljić does not just colour or sketch things in. She communicates the inescapable truths of a song like “We Watch Them Fall” with an unbelievable alertness and expressiveness. Sometimes she does this with a punk attitude, sometimes in psychedelic indulgence, sometimes she's pseudo-naive. She knows how to provoke and spread mischief. She can feign and evade, but when she declaims words like “It’s a simple gravity. We watch them fall. They are food of the next revolution,” she makes her point with telling precision.  In the title track “Lampedusa Lullaby” KUU! present a dark dystopian vision of human cargo on the move: “Endless journey through the night, over black-eyed sea.” Kuljić can dwell on the feeling of being in unfamiliar places, of uncertain dawn, of strangers and of past events – her songs can become slide shows from other people's lives. Lampedusa is no longer just a Mediterranean island between Tunisia and Sicily. As a real place with its traffickers and migrants, where cross-border death, unscrupulousness and illegality are all too commonplace, it has become a metaphor for a large-scale criminal business where the fates of individuals count for far too little, and where there is evidence everywhere of the failure of traditional politics to meet new challenges. These are the things that Jelena Kuljić has such a strong imperative and a need to sing about.  KUU! is a band of superlatives. It is an outstanding representation of new European jazz at its most innovative, but also shows on “Lampedusa Lullaby” with razor-sharp precision a way that rock music can function in 2018. That way is neither about grandstanding nor competing, it is about collective expression. Without faffing or fiddling, they find a place to go – and they go there together. In the centre, the drums turn up the pressure, while to the left and right the two guitars merge into a gigantic and sensitive meta-instrument. And what emerges quite naturally is good, forceful and evocative music beyond category. It is unnecessary to mention either Zappa or Nina Hagen as reference points, just listen with the volume turned up, and forget all preconceptions. It speaks to us because it has something to say.  The music on "Lampedusa Lullaby" packs an incredible power. It disturbs, connects, it has a way of getting through to the feet, the head and the soul – and all the same time. Sometimes three conspiratorial individualists with their instruments might lay out a comfortable rug for their singer – and sometimes it might be a bed of nails. Heard live, and with Jelena Kuljić's theatrical art coming into play, this music grows ingeniously, inventively – and irresistibly.

Frank Möbus, Rudi Mahall, and John Schröder showcase their live performance from the 2001 Montreux Jazz Festival. Awarded the Quarterly Prize 2005.

"Witty, unconventional, and artfully staged. The three Berliners are already being celebrated as 'the most important representatives of German avant-garde jazz.'" - (SPIEGEL)

Frank Möbus, Rudi Mahall & John Schröder create innovative jazz fusion. Recorded in 2000 in Hannover and mastered at Bauer Studios.