The visual artist and musician Michaela Melián likes to connect her works with places. In all formats, whether for music, sound installations or paintings. A song by her band FSK is called “Munich”. The sound installation “Memory Loops” consists of sound recordings from the Nazi era that are distributed and available throughout the city of Munich. Michaela Melián’s solo albums have titles like “Los Angeles” and “Baden-Baden”.
Memories of places, accompanied by ghost music: Different from the sound of FSK Melián’s sound signature, which she conceived and recorded as a soloist, tends to appear gently eerie. Not in the sense that she’s scary. It is too conceptual and too open to meaning for that. But in the sense of an elusive otherworldliness, which is, so to speak, a medium for all sorts of sound layers, which ultimately seem old and contemporary at the same time.
From art school to the pantry
More specifically: Places also appear on Melián’s new album “Music for a While” as references for the predominantly instrumental tracks. “Im Lerchenfeld” is named after the address of the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK). Like most of the pieces on the album, it is based on a monotonous rhythm, programmed by co-producer Felix Raeithel, overlaid by a minimalist piano and synths.
The strings come from the artist and violinist Ruth May and the violist Elen Harutyunyan. The track could last 15 or 2 minutes, a saxophone wafting over and over again as if from the pantry next door creates a little sense of time. It’s actually 5 minutes.
If you had to attach a genre term to this strangely beautiful album, it would probably be chamber music. But unlike usual, it is completely free of kitsch. Either way, its organizing principle is the loop, which is then filled in, varied and subverted. The sound palette is very diverse, you only notice it on the second or third listen.
Guitar noise in the fairytale forest
“Tübingen” consists of emerging and descending ambient loops and at the end a gently rumbling drone. “Nordwest-Passage” sounds even more open-ended and hypnotic, while “Märchenwald” is, counterintuitively, the title of the album’s darkest track, with guitar noise and menacing humming.
Michaela Melián has again selected cover versions for “Music for a While”. She tries on “My Other Voice” by the Sparks and Irving Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful.” For the Sparks interpretation, Melián uses her bitter voice, which despite vocoder still sounds like a reincarnation of Nico. “They Say It’s Wonderful”, like the entire album, seems like music that would also be appropriate in the hotel bar of “The Shining”.
Michaela Melián: „Music for a While“ (A-Musik);
live: March 27, 2026 Kunstverein Lübeck, further concerts in the summer
Not because it’s that scary (Stanley Kubrick’s film isn’t really scary, it’s more like conceptual art), but because it perpetuates something old.
Just ghost music. However, the ghosts of the past are not victorious in the art of Michaela Meliánbut have become objects of contemplation with which to work and which, perhaps, can be transformed into something else.