dialog – JOÃO ORECCHIA

SICKER MAN

BLANK RECORDS 2021

Dialog is Tobias Vethake‘s aka Sicker Man’s second consecutive, purely instrumental release. The Berlin-based composer and musician left the familiar, yet beaten paths of experimental pop music for the previous album Off The Trail, reflecting his earliest musical influences and relying solely on his cello’s expressive voice – an attempt to remeasure the musical field in between off-contemporary, noise and instant composition. Now Sicker Man is expanding this inner dialogue, and opens it up to include the voices of several protagonists of Berlin’s experimental music scene. Designed as a series of short recording sessions he met old friends and companions, as well as new colleagues in the summer of 2019:

Aidan Baker (Nadja, Hypnodrone Ensemble)
Ángela Muñoz Martínez (nunofyrbeeswax)
João Orecchia (Motel Mari)
Jörg Maria Zeger (Perlonex)
Kiki Bohemia (Slutty Clowns)
Lip Smh (Ex-Krikl-Krakl)
Manuel Klotz (Loft Party)
Schneider TM (die Angel, Locust Fudge)

With the release of Dialog the outcome of these special musical encounters is now accessible to the inclined and advanced listener. In the liner notes for the album the German philosopher Thomas Khurana wrote:
“Taken literally, a dialogue is therefore what arises through the words, in the midst of and between them. The dialogue does not consist in the words of either side, but what occurs between this word and that word, this reason and that one. […] What we hear in these dialogues is one word sounding through the other. […] Like in a doubly exposed photograph, the individual elements become both more ethereal and more defined. They touch and blend, align and dissociate at the same time and take on the remarkable capacity of ghosts: the ability to inhabit one another, one voice speaking through the other.“
In times of increasing polarization and division, the space between two opposites gains significance in this dialogical form. Focusing on the perception and endurance of various positions, instead of trying to overcome and synthesize difference, is Sicker Man’s artistic response to the swelling noise of time.