Anna Erhard
Berlin-based Swiss artist Anna Erhard shares new double A side single Campsite/Horoscope taken from forthcoming second album Campsite due in September.
The title track is not a longingly plucked guitar song for the campfire, mind you. On the contrary, "Campsite" has a cool beat around which it clangs and rings. The guitars create all sorts of noise, Anna Erhard recites a series of campsite memories in a voice that sounds like how you feel when awakened by the morning sun after a great night and a short sleep in the overheating tent.
The song "Horoscope" also has a special sense of humour, which runs through the lyrics and into the sonic backdrop, for which Anna and Pola have come up with a rhythmic drag in the chorus that is pleasingly disconcerting and unusual in pop music: who wants to count the measure, has already lost. "I read my horoscope and picked out the lines I liked best and put them together again" says Erhard about the lyrical slant of the track.
CAMPSITE is her second album under her own name after SHORT CUT (2021). Previously, Anna Erhard was the singer and guitarist of the Basel-based indie-folk band Serafyn, which released two albums in the mid-10s. After that, however, it felt to Anna Erhard as if the band's sound had run its course. She moved to Berlin, played her first solo gigs, and let her new home inspire her songwriting.
"Relationships and encounters in Berlin are more fleeting, the whole life is more in flux," she says. "It's clear that these experiences influence my songs."
On her solo debut SHORT CUT, she had searched for short paths through this urban thicket. CAMPSITE, on the other hand, sounds like a determination of where she stands. Anna Erhard has turned her songwriting completely inside out. Up to now, she has been a singer/songwriter in a rather conventional way, i.e. first she wrote the songs on her guitar, then she went into the studio. Because the pandemic had cancelled out normality anyway, it resulted from the circumstances that Anna Erhard and Pola Roy developed a different way of working for the new album: The two arranged to meet in Pola Roy's Kreuzberg studio and experiment. "Whereby it looked like Pola and I played beats and synths together," says Anna Erhard. Step by step, these elements gave rise to text building blocks, melody fragments - and finally songs.
Many of the pieces on CAMPSITE reveal this history of development between improvisation and experimentation. There is also her dry humour, which makes CAMPSITE so great and unique - take a look at the promo photos and videos of this artist for more of her irreverent style.
It's a lot of fun to accompany Anna Erhard on her journey through the ten new songs on her upcoming album. To see how she playfully changes the moods of her music. How she sometimes lets the words flow, sometimes formulates them very precisely. And how she finds ways to open up new perspectives for the genre of indie singer/songwriter. CAMPSITE is an album for indoors and outdoors. For extro- and introverted moments. For bright days and dark nights.
