*300 copies limited edition* Berlin-based percussionist and vocalist Teresa Riemann presents Can I stare at you publicly?, a new collection of solo works for percussion and voice. The pieces are meticulously composed, while their origins lie in improvisation, and improvisation remains part of the way Riemann performs them. The compositions stay open, allowing her to interpret them differently each time and keeping the music in a state of movement rather than fixing it into a final form.
On “The strangest cat will bite your head off”, rhythm becomes immediate and physical — a punchy, relentless construction. Elsewhere, on “You won’t go”, repetition takes on a more ritualistic character, circling rather than resolving. No two performances are quite alike. This openness is not an end in itself, but a means of keeping the pieces fully alive: allowing them to remain responsive, changing bodies rather than becoming fixed objects. The result is music in which composition and spontaneous interpretation remain closely bound together. Throughout the album, Riemann works with contradiction as both subject and method. There is precision and instinct, structure and disruption, force and vulnerability. Her songs and texts ask whether life is possible under the conditions given to us, and what kind of life that might be. Isolation, the constant presence of images, and the pressure to continually produce evidence of one's own existence appear alongside questions of disappearance and appearance, change as the only form of stability, and violence as an inherent element of human relationships.
The voice is not placed above the percussion, but exists within the same physical space. Songwriting becomes another form of percussion — a way of articulating, repeating and confronting the contradictions that run through the music and through everyday existence. “A living contradiction, that’s all I am, always on the opposite sides of one supposed center, simultaneously.” - Teresa Riemann
There is an existential quality at the centre of Can I stare at you publicly?: an attempt to remain present while everything around us is subject to disappearance, transformation and contradiction. The music does not resolve these tensions. It inhabits them. 577 Records is pleased to welcome Teresa Riemann to its roster. Can I stare at you publicly? marks the beginning of a collaboration that we hope will continue to develop in the years ahead.
