Codes

Description

After Xmal Deutschland’s success with four albums on cult labels like 4AD, Huwe abandoned music to pursue her career in the visual arts. But leaving her legacy behind wasn’t so easy. During the pandemic, Huwe reconsidered her decades-long absence from music. Under the impetus of longtime friend Mona Mur – vocalist, songwriter, and film score composer (as well as leader of the early 80s project Mona Mur & Die Mieter) – Huwe decided to join Mur in Berlin. With fellow Xmal Deutschland guitarist and collaborator Manuela Rickers, they exchanged musical and poetic ideas that would eventually become the album ‘Codes’. Initially inspired by the diary entries of Moshe Shnitzki, who, at 17, left his home in 1942 to live in the cavernous forests of White Russia as a partisan, Codes speaks to the human experience and what extremes can do to an individual. “The result is a poetic and musical cosmos that encompasses the following themes: forest, fear, pain, loss, violence and loneliness but also beauty, longing, hope and the will to survive,” explains Huwe. These thematic extremities cause an errant storm to surge through Codes – a passing squall, a cyclonic explosion of nature’s force – but one that breathes anticipation amidst the cold. With elegant production from Mur and Huwe and mixing and mastering by Jon Caffery (Joy Division, Gary Numan, Einstürzende Neu-bauten), epic constructions crash and diffuse, the sleek synthesised sonic drones even claustrophobic at times. Xmal Deutschland, now considered a forerunner of the post-punk movement, was never complacent but always ravenous in its attack throughout the 1980s. Huwe’s return is no different. Unexpected but long overdue, ‘Codes’ is that missing page in post-punk’s history books, the freshly spread paint on the decades-old canvas – it’s the product of the indefatigable will to survive on its own.