“Fuck you, rock, fuck you / Fuck you and your bands / Fuck your whole way / Fuck the verse and the chorus / And whatever else I have to do / Until the solo comes – Bitch!” You have to imagine how these lyrics are sung over an annoying beeping noise and a nasty, dull beat. The deep female speaking voice is slightly distorted and at the same time sounds extremely disgusted. “Rock has lost a fan / My hatred gave birth to bauSTELLE!”
Luise Matthes came up with bauSTELLE: “I made a lot of music with men, and with rock musicians too,” explains the artist in an interview with the taz. Many of these guys told her how it worked with the music: “Techno, hip hop, only idiots listen to that,” they always said. I was allowed to play a few organ chords, if at all. We make handmade rock music here!
Matthes is sitting in her rehearsal room, in an industrial courtyard in Weimar, right behind the train station. The 40 square meter room is a colorful mess: there is a piano, clothes and stage costumes hanging in a corner, part of the room serves as a workshop – Luise Matthes is a wood sculptor by profession. Family photos, a portrait of Bob Dylan with a fake autograph (“Dülan”) and a large, flower-framed portrait of Gisèle Pelicot hang in the sofa seating area.
Through the pandemic with acidhouse
“The worst thing from their point of view was trap sound. But at some point I got older and thought: That’s not true! And then Covid started, and I had a lot of time on my hands. So I started listening to all this stuff, acid house and Detroit-Technoand all that Love Parade stuff.” In fact, Covid also gave birth to bauSTELLE: a one-woman show that does whatever she wants.
construction site: “Night Shift” (People’s People);
live: April 4th, 2026 “A-Tage” Potsdam, April 18th, 2026 “Lokomov” Chemnitz, May 29th, 2026 “Komplex” Schwerin, May 30th, 2026 “Basta” Görlitz, July 25th. “Faetzig Camp,” continues
Categories like good taste don’t count for them. Using samples from the freesound.org platform, she makes eardrums twitch and sometimes diaphragms too. During the live performances for her debut album “Interstellar” (2022), she could be seen in a tight, glittery dress. Waist-length ponytails made of sealing hemp dangled left and right of her head, and in her hand was a plastic sword as tall as herself.
With her other hand she worked on her computer and kept laughing at her absurd song lyrics. For Matthes, it’s become a Jekyll and Hyde thing: “I thought to myself, since my music was created from a kind of breaking of taboos, I would also use things for the stage character where people say: That’s annoying or embarrassing. I also needed a name. As a restorer, I climb around on scaffolding a lot during the day, and when darkness comes, this character folds out like this, then I’m bauSTELLE, that’s the night version of me.”
No more fear at all
This dark side of Luise Matthes has now released a second album: “Nachtschicht”. The music is screaming: After the efforts of the male-dominated bands (it started with cover bands in the Thuringian province), the artist simply stands alone on stage and develops a power and wit as a soloist that has rarely been experienced. How does this transformation take place? The 36-year-old just shrugs her shoulders: “I’ve done so much stuff on stages that I’m not afraid at all anymore.”
On “Nachtschicht” there are 14 pieces, all arranged using open source software. Even the song titles are fun: “Amokgirl”, “Damage Dealer” (in an “East Germany” and a “West Germany version”), “Kein Himmel über Gotha” (there is a creepy black metal-style video, shot all alone on a November morning in the Rhön).
“Alone in the Bell Tower” tells the story of a mysterious woman who supports us in our everyday activities: “I uncrumb the toaster for you / I paste the posters for you / I burn the fruit schnapps for you / I sleep in the monastery for you.”
However, the whole thing is not that mysterious: Matthes had in mind all the service providers who keep life going and whose work only received a timid general appreciation during the pandemic. The fact that this is then spelled out as “I water the garden for you / I smell the roast for you” – Matthes calls it “Helge-Schneider-ness”: absurdity with abyss.
Good taste doesn’t count for them. It causes eardrums to twitch and sometimes diaphragms
As far as the sound level is concerned, influences such as: Deichkind and arrest warrant attached. But bauSTELLE sounds are even duller and cheaper than those of the Hamburg electro band and their rhymes are far less pathetic than those of the Offenbach neighborhood biggies.
Honoring a professional group
She borrows their harshness to pay homage to another professional group in the song “Admin”: “You’re not very careful with your data / Knowing you, I can guess your login / Whoreson69, and I come in / First try and your email account is mine / Your Twitch money goes entirely to the Duisburg women’s shelter / Thank you, it doesn’t look so bleak for the women anymore.”
Of course, the music and appearance of bauSTELLE can be read in a feminist way. But Matthes doesn’t want to overstate this; she calls it “preaching to the choir”. She says she might make more of an impact in everyday life if she works as a restorer on a construction site with men.
As loud-mouthed and wide-legged as bauSTELLE appears, Matthes also sings more from the underdog perspective. “I would love to be like you,” it says in “IWSGWD”: “I would love to be the boss / 2 meter 50 tall / I would love to be the boss,” to a shimmering, technoid beat, with a lot of reverb and echo on the voice.
The image of the crazy guy who indulges in fantasies of omnipotence in a secret palace (or a Weimar backyard?) always comes to mind. In times of real crazy guys, this might also have a particularly relieving effect: if only bauSTELLE were the boss! Preferably 2 meters 50 tall and with a plastic sword in his hand.
Some lost guys
However, sometimes guys who she wouldn’t count as part of the “choir” get lost at her concerts. “Then it becomes exciting when you have an audience that thinks: What kind of art crap is this?” Sometimes she gets these guys through the cheap beat: “Then I really notice how they’re resisting it. They’re already checking that I’m not I’m Mickie Krause or something. But something happens and then they let go and celebrate it.”
Schlager, that could also be a genre for bauSTELLE. To show the rock men: “All the men who have given me advice in my life, I still hear them. They evaluate what I do, there’s an internal dialogue going on as soon as I wake up.” bauSTELLE was born to take revenge. And this revenge is sweet.