ALEX STOLZE - Raash ve Ruach
How to react to 10/7, the bestial massacre with which Hamas has murdered itself from humanity? With noise and a lot of commotion - Raash - or with wind and silence and spirit, in Hebrew Ruach?
An answer, his, begins at the beginning, Alex Stolze was 13 when the GDR fell apart. He himself had not been put on a strict course - his parents being Jewish and Catholic, standing in the GDR with 2 x 1 foot off track - but it was his world nonetheless. When you are 13 and it breaks, you know that such things are possible.
Then the new world, the West, the phenomenal pop from bands like Portishead, Talk Talk, Radiohead. Phenomenal because they did not change the world, it comes down to understanding it. Standing Karl Marx on his feet, Alex Stolze founds Bodi Bill. With their art-techno, the three-member band first shakes up the local club scene, then Berlin, then the rest of the new world, then a pause. Alex founds Unmap, a decade ago the quartet - with its distinctly art-affine music - was a guest at Christuskirche.
An urban urtyp concert back then, and now Alex Stolze is also part of our indie series urban urtyp. The conditions, however, are completely different: A few hours before the massacres in Israel - where Alex has often traveled, he has friends there, he loves the country and the indie scene there - he signed a label contract in Berlin, the songs for “Raash ve Ruach” had been written, and the next day the world shatters. And Alex’s voice breaks.
Through it he lets his violin speak, he plays against his speechlessness. Deadly sad and danceable. Like life, music between neoclassicism and electronica, a rebellion against the noise cancelling. Even when one's own voice falters. When Ruach becomes what the Jewish Bible describes as God, whom you do not see, instead “a voice”, but not one that sings, rather “a voice of floating silence”.
In Judaism, there is the mourning year, the Jahrzeit. With the Jewish New Year - in 2024 Rosh Hashanah coincided with the first anniversary of the Hamas massacre - Alex Stolze plays his way back into life.
Together with Ben Osborn, writer, songwriter, composer, born in Oxford, known at the Ruhr, he works among others with the Dortmund Theater. And has been friends with Alex for a long time, Ben Osborn is part of his “Kultur-Kibbuz”, a kind of farm for independence that Alex has cultivated for years, the indie farm lies in the easternmost corner of Uckermark, once the deepest GDR.
No, there is no closing of a circle anywhere, perhaps wounds can be closed, it’s about understanding them in noise and silence.
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
