SCHNEEWEISS & ROSENROT

Feel the energy

The sun sets and after the last notes from a filthy piano in the echo of memory, I start listening to a music that discovers new places in my evening activities. Schneeweiss & Rosenrot have created Pretty Frank (Yellowbird Records, 2011) as a syncopated mosaic of evocative tones and words full of a lyricism born of voracious musical fits. In each of them doors, the rhythms are wildly exciting, walking from impulse to a melodic calm with an unusual accuracy. Life is like them, a syncope always on the edge of the abyss.

It is an international band whose members come from Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg and Switzerland. They all are young musicians with a great jazz knowledge, taking it to new sonorous lands as well as avant-garde and pop. Widely experienced on stage, their many facets are surprisingly combined in their text and music compositions. Their music goes beyond the typical structure of a popular song touching a vaudeville style. Their theatrical air can be captured on the cover of the album, making clear that their creations are never ended because their live performance is always a kind of rebirth. Improvisation captures the heartbeat of the moment.
 

Lucia Cadotsch plays with her passionate voice converting each word in a starting point for something new and the audience becomes seduced by her immediately. Johanna Borchert has on her hands the expression of a beauty emerged from the heart while she improvises notes as well as a rain in an eternal dance with the wind. From her piano, we get her self-portrait, so passionate always in a vital red. Petter Eldh is the beat itself. His bass surrounds us by a creative nerve while Marc Lohr creates virtuosos rhythms on drums.

Songs like Pretty Frank, the playful Ping Pong Love, the more melancholy Daddy Longleg, the disturbing Newman’s Housecat, the cloudy Coast Starlight Express or the fascinating Splendit 33, make of Schneeweiss & Rosenrot a unique place in music, really innovative, like an open window to lean out knowing that nothing will be the same again.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Photos courtesy of Schneeweiss & Rosenrot