Aglaja Camphausen & Thomas Falke Underwater Calling - Kitchen Recording Series (CD)

The composition lays the tracks, while the locomotive is the instrument. Then the meandering through landscapes begins, both with and without fellow passengers.  
My parents' home was influenced by classical music; my father was a violinist in the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne. For his  listening pleasure he had Mozart or Wagner playing at an excessive volume in the living room. Music, including classical music, was always my deepest feeling, my greatest talent, my gateway to the imagination. During my cello studies I had endless discussions with fellow students, trying to convince them that it was possible to play a color. Even today I think it can be done. The power of the association would have to be so strong that the listener "sees" the same thing as you do. Learning an instrument, however, in addition to this musicality and imaginative ability requires, first of all, years of hours of study. Technique, fingerings, bowing exercises, etc. are learned just so that you can forget them again at some later point and incorprate, carefree, the greatest technical difficulties on the way to themusical in-between world.
My influences were manifold. Frank Zappa, adored by my big brother, whom I in turn adore. He had all of Zappa's records and often pulled me into his room to play me an ingenious guitar riff, some crazy idea, an absurd lyric, thus introducing me to Zappa's world. And then: Can!, to be found in all the record piles in the family. I myself began buying Can records early on with my first savings, records which I still listen to with much sensitivity. I was lucky to work with the drummer, Jaki Liebezeit when I was hired to record with singer-songwriter Robert Coyne, first as a cellist, then as a backup singer. I followed Liebezeit when he drummed with Drums of Chaos at Stollwerck or Rhenania in Cologne. I would go anywhere to hear him play. One thing he would say that I much appreciate is that the metronome was his greatest teacher. I, too, see great freedom in clear, unrelenting rhythm. And of course there's Holger Czukay! He enriched my youth so infinitely with his rhythmic, melodic and poetic electronics. Like a trailblazer for electro and house, this music often seemed brilliant to me and Czukay's album "On the Way to the Peak of Normal" spun constantly on my turntable.
So it is actually not surprising that after a career as a cellist and host of my own classical salon, I now present an album that speaks a completely new musical language. The choice of pieces and the reduction of the instrumentation to voice, double bass and cello offers so much room for my musical sensibilities that it seems a logical step to take at this point in my career: the reduction to essentials. Away with the frills and in with quintessence.

The songs suggested by Werner were all previously unknown to me and yet immediately became gems. There is, for example, "Anyone and Everyone", which deeply moves me. It was written, like other songs on our LP, by the unique Lhasa de Sela. The lyrics, at first sight comforting and full of light and contentment subversively sow doubt, as if all happiness were fragile: "There's not enough breath in a single day to pray everyone will be okay." To create this fragility, I simply allowed the voice to sound lost at the beginning of the song. I'm even more touched by the vulnerability and fragility that seeps from my favorite number, "Dust, Flesh and Bones," originally by Matt Elliott. This song reveals just how ephemeral, even morbid, everything is. "In the disparate clamor of the chaos that surrounds you, it's hard to know which of the voices that you hear are your own." Here, Thomas and I witnessed pauses creeping in involuntarily, like a groping, like a constantly new sensing. Ambiguities are what stimulate my imagination and they echo noticeably in me.  
Underwater Calling. I wish you associations and excursions into fantasy worlds while listening to this album. The main thing is music, because the truth is: touching is what touches."