KUU! | Artificial Sheep

Nachholtermin vom 14.01.2022 - bereits gekaufte Karten behalten ihre Gültigkeit.

Crashing indie jazz with a post-punk attitude. Sometimes wacky, sometimes painful, sometimes tender and touching: "KUU!" is where actress and singer Jelena Kuljić (Volksbühne Berlin, Kammerspiele Munich, among others) meets guitar freethinkers Kalle Kalima and Frank Möbus and drum innovator Christian Lillinger.

"Basically, we just want to play. Good concerts with this band are blissful," says guitarist Kalle Kalima. Singer Jelena Kuljić adds, "When we play, it's pure paradise." For the audience, too. Completed by guitarist Frank Möbus and drummer Christian Lillinger, KUU! was on the road and celebrated at major festivals and hip clubs. It would have continued like that, but then Corona came along....

It was haunting and unsettling, as if a dystopian future was suddenly present. Anyway, KUU! - which means moon in Finnish - had been thinking about setting the lyrics of the new album in a near future.
Nothing in these lyrics about our brave new world is delivered with a raised forefinger. Yearning, charming and direct, then again brittle, unwieldy and provocative, this highly intense singer, who works as an actress at the Munich Kammerspiele, interprets the flood of images of the present with their heightened urgency. This can no longer be negotiated in conventional verse-chorus schemes. There is no trallala here. How the grandiose band with its singer climbs lustily through these mountains of lyrics, how they serve their so different songs and heighten them with sophisticated musicality, that is without comparison. They illuminate chasms and gorges, preserve the enigmas and act as a team beyond self-promotion. This is striking and exciting down to the details. Precisely because of this, this art penetrates to essences without ever moralizing. The two guitars merge into one mega-instrument, serving neither the competitive of jazz nor the simplistic of rock. Into this in-between realm, the drums strike with ever new punchy finesse. This results in music exactly for this time: energetic, disruptive, massive, yet at the same time delicate and hauntingly plausible. This is a stroke of luck for unprejudiced listeners.