german text

bobo in white wooden houses
cosmic ceiling

To be just a songwriter wasn't enough for Bobo. After the success of the charming folk pop of her debut album Bobo in white wooden houses on her second album Passing Stranger she discovered the attraction of dance grooves. On her new album Cosmic Ceiling Bobo took another step in that direction: she presents herself as an electrified chanteuse, moving between "warm" electronic pop a la The Orb or OMD and that certain Suzanne-Vega-feeling. The sound on some songs was finally polished up by breakbeat specialist and Prodigy producer Neil McLellan in London.

A backyard studio in East London suburb Hackney. Unspectacular. Walls and ceiling painted with various hippie zodiac signs and astro patterns, nevertheless the Strongroom Studios form an important part of modern, electronic music "made in UK". Prodigy and the Pet Shop Boys produce here. The Orbital rented their own room for experimenting, and recently the area was swarming with excited teenage girls, because East 17 honoured the studio with their presence. This is the musical atmosphere where some of Bobos finely spun songs, which in a different context would be considered excellent singer/songwriter material, get their top polish. Little One I'll Miss You, Yellow Moon, Bungee, Cosmic Ceiling and the single Travel In My Mind got their final mixing from Neil McLellan. The actual production was done in Berlin, in Bobos own backyard studio at Prenzlauer Berg. The core of the band today is Bobo, guitarrist Olav 'Olsen' Bruhn and manager Emuanuel 'Emu' Fialik as consultant. All three confirm that the use of the breakbeat is not a contradiction: "Peoples listening habits have changed a lot over the last years. The music in the pubs today sounds basically different now, the rhythms of Soul II Soul, Massive Attack or Depeche Mode are influencing practically everybody." There were already trance like songs - trance not in the techno sense - and suggestions of breakbeat - on Bobo's last album Passing Stranger (1993), a highly successful chart album. While Passing Stranger keeps using travel metaphors, Cosmic Ceiling rather displays a certain atmosphere throughout the album. Bobo: "I didn't want it to be bombastic, but rather transparent and airy, airy like the air zodiac signs. I wanted to create a 'female album'..." "Spacey, multidimensional...", Emu and Olsen helpfully add. - "Yes, exactly. Male albums always sound so complete, so finished. But I want to keep questions open in my music, there have to be holes and things that fire the imagination. Bobo in white wooden houses are not a band in the common sense; Bobo sees herself as an independently working one woman enterprise with permanent consultants. Besides Emu and Olsen this includes Ingo Vauk und the production team Bauknex (Moses Schneider, b, progr.; Bernd Lauber, dr, progr.; Stefan Gottwald, keyb, progr.), who each produced half of the songs and form the band periphery as studio and tour musicians respectively. "We had been fascinated by the idea of decentralized recording", Emu explains. This somewhat different style of work became the guideline for Bobo and her men. Her music is allowed to mature independently in her own Berlin studio, without a fixed framework. Some of the songs were even taped on video at home, since the equipment was so easy to transport. "That way you can easily work in different rooms and try different 'room sounds' - all this went into Cosmic Ceiling."

"Bobo wasn't interested in having a consolidated band, but rather a modern way of recording her music. We would have liked it best to send our tapes round from one musician to the next, with everybody contributing some of their own ideas. Neil McLellan has rather more experience with tracks than with songs, for example; this was a new experience for him, which in turn led to unusual ideas." But first things first. Bungee for example describes Bobos impressions at her first bungee jumping and it is a metaphor for an outbreak of happiness. The 180 bpm song starts with a jazzy "walking bass" and is reminiscent of arrangements of songs by Shiny Gnomes or Boa's Voodooclub. There are fine rock breaks and rather nasty sounds in the background, illustrating Bobo mounting the ladder and the relieving flight downwards. Bungee is a bubblegum trasher, which you would like to hear in the "caterpillar" on the fairground. "Let's dance", Bobo and Olsen say, as the first grooves of Yellow Moon float through the small basement appartment on Russell Square, where the three of them stayed while in London. Yellow Moon really invites to jumping around: Bobo's voice is mixed far to the front and sound like sung over a megaphone, there are funky little 'brass' specks off the sampler, a nice, sick guitar over a groovy background. Next it's quiet, almost pious: Little One I'll Miss You is, what is commonly called a jazz standard. Bobo's heartbreaking cover makes this a synthetic Bossa Nova, driven by her high, fragile voice. Atmospheric brass instruments and beautiful echoes create a pleasant rainy day tristesse. Almost better is the description offered by Bobo: "A mix between Astrid Gilberto and Talk Talk." Bobo sings the title track Cosmic Ceiling very gingerly an restrained, sparingly accompanied by a "carpet guitar" (Bobo). She is singing about things which are very characteristic for her. The first single release will be Travel In My Mind. A modern clubfloor track, combining trance sounds and sound bubbles ("We blew into a glass of water with a straw, at 3am and sampled it.") with a beautifully sung melody. Finally, in Violent Room wonderful fractionated violin melodies (contributed by a chinese street musician in Berlin) illustrate a lingeringly presented brittle and fragile song. Besides the single, Bungee and Little One I'll Miss You this is one of the corner stones of the album. Additional songs are Beloved, Paper Cues, Perl Drops Rain and Sailor's Bride - beautiful titles, telling touching stories about strange and memorable people and situations. Bobo, it seems, threw her finely spun dreams onto the scale and turned them into a very sensitive, superior, independent, international album. In the german musical landscape Cosmic Ceiling is currently quite unique.

current album: cosmic ceiling (rel: 13.4.95)
current single: travel in my mind (rel: 13.4.95)

Copyright Motor Music
Printed with permission

Translation from the original german text
by Claudia Spix and Klaus Kluge.