Talking To Turtles

Talking to Turtles just like that, after a nine-year break from releasing, stroll back from the off into the picture we call the musical landscape. Their new album is a quirky, wondrous collection of ten songs about the unpredictability of being. Vignettes and windows into the worlds of thought and feeling of various characters and are accompanied by music with a warmth and organic texture all its own, the very signatures of this band. Only: The duo sounds even more casual in 2023, lyrics even more playful and tells even deeper and more multilayered than before.

Claudia Sievers & Florian Sievers are surrounded by a striking charm. There is something unique about the way they have been communicating with their audience for 15 years. Now they seem to have succeeded in inscribing this attitude towards themselves and the world into the new album as an audible gesture: This album propagates the exchange, the approach, the invitation.
There is a serenity shimmering through the soft shell of 'And What's On Your Mind'. From the first song 'I'm A Pretender', to the last 'Junior 3rd', lines of lyrics are cast in melodies that couldn't be more beautiful shaken from their sleeves. The songs are consistently sung in two voices, no one pushing themselves to the fore. The guitars and Rhodes, sometimes casually rhythmic, sometimes elegantly stripped down, blend with intricate sound collages, woodwinds and cleverly applied drums and percussion. This is part of the Talking To Turtles magic; their music has an innocence about it that, together with a depth of craftsmanship, formulates an irresistible contrast.

The usual introspective lyrics have gained an even more conscious look in 2023, for the world that surrounds them and the people in it. The strange paths that exchanges can take between us. The ebb and flow of tension and release. Told with a kind of trusting distance of the participant observer.

Listening to 'And What's On Your Mind' we also think of indie classics from the late 90s and early 2000s. Yo la Tengo. Belle and Sebastian. Built to Spill. Possibly Elliott Smith as well. The two have inhaled this wonderfully unpretentious approach of the aforementioned artists and brought it with them into the present. In other words: If these genres are celebrating a real renaissance, then Talking to Turtles are certainly not entirely innocent of this development.

The duo's first album 'Monologue' was released in 2010 on the Hamburg label 'Devil Duck Records'. Their second album 'Oh The Good Life' they record in Seattle (USA) in 2011. Extensive tours through Germany, Europe and the USA followed.
In 2014, 'Split', the band's third album, is released. Talking To Turtles play their last concert so far in 2018 at Funkhaus Berlin. In addition to Talking to Turtles, Florian Sievers releases two German-language albums in 2018 and 2022 as 'Das Paradies' (Grönland Records) and produces music with and for other artists:inside, for theater, and film. Talking to Turtles are Claudia and Florian Sievers. They live and work in Leipzig.