Combining vulnerability and perseverance, Lucerne musician Remo Helfenstein presents Spite, his first solo album on Präsens Editionen. While his first EP, Comforting Katharina, released in 2022, showcased raw and devotional impulses, Spite expands the scope, blending psychedelic drift with moments of sudden lucidity, wounded grandeur with flashes of pop transcendence.The album thrives on contradictions: oscillating between the no-wave austerity of Suicide and the meditative (and Dadaist) expanses of the Bitchin Bajas and Bonnie "Prince" Billy collaborations, while opening up to passages of gospel-infused breadth. At times intimate and porous, at others expansive and ecstatic, Helfenstein crafts a sonic universe fusing analog and digital processes, at once deeply personal and resolutely collective. This duality strikingly comes to life in the recordings with musicians Klara Germanier (backing vocals and guitar), Raphael Loher (keyboards), Manuel Troller (guitar), and Olivier Vogel (bass), present in various constellations across the seven tracks.Spite is not devotional music, but devotion itself: unyielding, uncompromising, vital. It insists on its own necessity – created because it had to be.
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