In The Spotlight: The Umlauts
Give yourself up to the one and only Berghain style techno kraut group.
Humankind is not as smart as it seems. Quite obviously, some of the best things were invented by accident: penicillin, slinky, Viagra, chocolate chip cookies and The Umlauts. While we’ve been in awe of most of them for a while now, we've only recently discovered the latter. A nine-member assemble playing to the rhythm of modern satire, taking the piss of krautrock, themselves and current affairs. We meet four core members of our new favourite supergroup, Anabelle Mödlinger, Maria Vittoria Faldini, Oliver Offord and Alfred Lear, to decide the future of music, discuss brand new EP and steal the secret of their effortless genius and charm.
“We didn’t really decide to start doing it because it happened under circumstance,” Alfred says on the beginnings of the group. Even though most of the used to jam together in Stroud to post-punk essentials like The Fall or X-Ray Spex in their teenage years, they had to wait until moving to London to become Umlauts. Therefore, among common misconception they’re not really a band from Stroud but a group with mixed backgrounds from Germany to Monaco. Eventually all of them crossed path on the Wimbledon College of Arts’s ground and reached out to Maria and Anabelle when realised that they needed singers. “We didn’t think it was gonna go anywhere, there was no outcome of it. It was very span of the moment,” Anabelle shares. “Very randomly and quite jokingly as well. We were never thinking that we’re ever getting anything out of it.”
“It came from the thing that we thought that The Umlauts is a really funny name for like a Berghain style techno kraut group,” says Ollie and Alf adds: “And we needed a song to go with that”. Created as a one-time fancy and temporary entertainment as a break from the art school realm, the band has quickly turned into a bit of a serious endeavours with everyone around being in on their joke including Iggy Pop who played their track live. “It took quite a while to get used to into the whole music game. Alf and Ollie have been making music forever and Anabelle and I never really did. It just happened. Anabelle got into it before me. I don’t remember how with ‘Boiler Suits’ it happened but they just asked Anabelle to write German lyrics and then they wanted me as well,” Maria shares. The Umlauts are a cross-genre and trans-European operation adapting bits and bops from their personal musing to the shared communal space. Think Neue Deutsche Welle vibe spiced up with English quirkiness.
“We’re not the biggest fans of kraut. Cabbage rock,” proclaims Ollie even though five seconds later everyone agrees that they actually listen to loads of it. “We just take the piss out of what we actually like as well,” sums up Anabelle. With diminishing of subcultures and blending often contradictory aesthetics in digital spaces, it’s hard to fish out any solid inspirations out of the blended online bayou. “It’s really hard to label things at the moment because obviously it’s such a trophy thing to say but we’re a generation of the internet where you get so many influences. Those kinds of musical boxes are almost something of the past because you’d be involved in a scene of some sort and function within those groups of people that you’d hang out with and that would form a group,” Anabelle says. “Then by labelling it, it becomes nostalgic,” Alfred adds, “It’d be quite exciting to label yourself, to be like ‘we’re this genre’. Sort of like attaching that genre to energy and presence but now it’s more like you’re attaching yourself to the history of that genre”. The Umlauts venture outside of musical binaries and have been devoted to preaching the non-genres gospel, allowing only few exceptions. “Only gabber remains. The last stronghold and genre of music,” Ollie laughs. “Gabber and ABBA,” Maria corrects.
The Umlauts are not afraid of bold statements and brave actions, always cheering themselves on. When recording shouty parts of their, named after Joseph Beuys book, single ‘Energy Plan’, they didn’t let Anabelle shy away from screaming. “They were with me and we were stomping. Such a good energy. It’s so amazing when all of sudden you can feel really comfortable with your voice,” she says. The video for it set the bar even higher. It’s serving Anabelle’s microwaved head and squishing fruits Maria with inch long nails. As for any great art piece, here also sacrifices were made. “I don’t think I’ll ever wear fake nails again. I was actually getting panic attacks while having them on, I was like ‘I need to fix my skirt but I cannot do it’,” Maria shares and Ollie adds: “That’s how Edward Scissorhands felt”.
Coming from an art background, they’re used to pushing boundaries and finding new means of expression though their approach to music making varies. “Music is more enjoyable than art. Art is not very enjoyable most of the time,” Anabelle quickly states [“Wow, big statement Anabelle,” Maria laughs] and elaborates: “Art has a tendency to overthink and make stories behind something that doesn't really need to be there because you either enjoy it or you don’t enjoy”. Both are representation of vast spectrum of emotions. According to Maria, art is the more mysterious one, it allows the creator the option of hiding behind the object. Music strips you naked of that freedom. “Songs can be a bit more in your face and they tell you how they make you feel at that point,” she says. “It’s a little bit harder to bullshit with music,” Alfred agrees.
Though it’s more straightforward, The Umlauts made sure to keep it interesting. The title of their debut EP ‘Ü’ happened to be a tongue twister for many non-German radio presenters. “It was so funny when we introduced our manager and label to the idea that we would call the album ‘Ü’. The guy who runs label just replied ‘oh brilliant, an album name that nobody can pronounce,” says Anabelle. It was either that or ‘The Ultimate Umlaut Eyebread’ though as we speak new ideas are brewing. “Maybe we should call it ‘Debüt EP’”, they laugh and pronounce it with an overexaggerated ‘ü’ in unison.
Luckily, the name issue is a thing of the past as they’re already working on a second EP where they went wild, reinterpreting Italian pop and their most beloved post-punk influences “The first track for it was this weird cover of ‘Frightened’ by The Fall that ended up just becoming a song. It’s not a cover anymore. I think me and Alf were kind of geeking out on the computer and trying to put it into ¾ timing,” Ollie says. The Umlauts don’t like to stand still so their PRAH studio sessions were combined with creatives bursts and brewing up concepts of preconceived ideas. “We work really separately when we’re making songs, sketches and everything so whenever we’re in Margate in the studio, everyone’s getting together and we finally giving birth to little bits and chunks and they start to feel a bit more complete and start make sense,” Maria explains.
While blasting out ‘Intergalactic’ by Beatie Boys and everything by Diam’s (Maria’s personal obsession), they’ve raced ahead, throwing out any preconception of musical brakes. “We went a bit further on this one and maybe got a bit too hedonistic with it at times and then being told off for going too far,” Ollie shares. Fascinated by layers, repetition and cheap melodies, they’re about to make neatly pack chaos their bestseller. “There’s one really exciting track there that I’m really looking forward to hear in a finished version,” Maria says and Anabelle adds, “At one point it had an Irish flute in it and the balalaika. It’s very Eastern sounding actually, some parts of it. Also, at one point Ollie was like ‘I want it to have a feeling of how night club would feel like if you were dreaming of going out’.” What they ended up with is a post-pandemic and post-identity crisis story about endless hooking up on a night out. Keeping their wicked sense of humour as their armours, The Umlauts fought their way through traces of confusion on their first record and came back self-aware. “I feel like we now are finding out a bit of what we can do with our voices. The attitude that we want and the characters that we want to play. I think that this EP had a lot of different spectrums. Different energies, vocally as well,” Maria says. They played around each element, choosing the ones that fitted the feelings most. “If there are little lovey bits and talk about relationship, I straight away go for Italian for example and Anabelle goes for German in different bits. We think about that a lot,” Maria adds.
Even though their process seems carefully pre-programmed, it’s quite the opposite. “Bit part of what we do is that we don’t think about the future too much. It’s all very spontaneous and in the moment. What I want to not use is not comedy but irony that’s behind The Umlauts. It really defines what we do,” says Maria. That spark for novelty is something they want to carry over into the future and perhaps a debut album where they could find a topic to obsess over as a team. Impressed with 80s sports footage in Caitlin Jenner’s documentary she’s recently watched, Anabelle is already suggesting a theme and Maria elaborates: “We were coming up with all these different sounds that we could record, like tennis ball hitting a racket or being at the gym and the weighs, putting them back and that cling you get from putting metal on metal”.
The Umlauts are rare species that came out of the South London’s lockdown lab. Soaking up strangeness of surroundings and ordinary mess that we’re stuck in and try to make sense of, they’ve came up with a musical antidote to it all. Don’t take notepads out. The ingredients of this recipe are so secret that they don’t even to know them. “I don’t know how we do it. I don’t think there’s formula in what we do,” says Ollie and Anabelle adds, “We thrive in chaos”. That must be the formula.