While other bands have used the difficult last few years to lose themselves in their archives or even go their separate ways, Holler My Dear has reinvented itself - for now at least. Because what we hear on the four-track EP Aftermath, released five years after the last studio album Steady As She Goes, is "an experiment," as the studied vocalist and composer cheerfully puts it on record.

Of course, Aftermath is primarily about aftermath of all kinds. Basically, the EP itself can be considered an aftermath, since it was originally meant to celebrate the band's tenth anniversary - "and then," says Winkler, "Corona came along." So instead of anniversary celebrations, the tracks deal with the Long Covid effects in the music scene, with structures that have broken away and are still breaking away. The theme is also the digital world and the excessive demands in it and on it, the burnout in the competitive society - and last but not least a waning confidence in the basis of the accumulated knowledge of mankind.

Thanks to the engagement of saxophonist and composer Wanja Slavin (LIUN and The Science Fiction Band, among others) as producer, "we looked for and found someone who sees us in a completely new way." Or rather hears. And indeed, the result is surprising. Instead of the usual warm acoustic sounds with a discreet hippie touch, the tracksInstead of the usual warm acoustic sounds with a discreet hippie touch, the pieces are governed by an electronic sound that is hazy in the best sense of the word, i.e. ambiguous and also mysterious, whose most striking feature is its complex architectonics, which layers many sound surfaces on top of each other. Instead of the usual warm acoustic sounds with a subtle hippie touch, the pieces are reigned by an electronic sound that is hazy in the best sense of the word, i.e. ambiguous and also mysterious, whose most striking feature is its complex architectonics, which layers many sound surfaces on top of each other.

Thus, the individual instruments were not recorded together in the studio, as has been customary with Holler My Dear so far, but one after the other. "So it's like a real pop band," laughs Winkler, who recently brought home the special prize from the jury of the German Jazz Prize with her Queer Cheer collective. Slavin, who was also nominated for the Jazz Prize in the Arrangement of the Year category, met the busy musician, who also appeared last year as curator of a brand-new festival with be kind, at another of her projects: the Wabi-Sabi Orchestra, where he filled in as saxophonist. "I liked what he had done as a producer for LIUN and for Mirna Bogdanović, so I wrote to him - and he accepted immediately," she recalls.

Now Slavin also draws the sextet sound into his mysterious electronic worlds. Meanwhile, the producer didn't have to start from scratch in the process, as Winkler had made it a point during Pandemic to delve deeper into music production, so she could come up with tracks that were already pre-produced. "They're still my tracks," she says, "but Wanja has gone further into the depths.“

In his remote house in a Brandenburg forest, the producer spent nights experimenting with finesses such as doubling and was not afraid to personally play recorders, trumpets and, of course, saxophones, but first and foremost tons of analog synthesizers when the production called for their timbres. It was a process that Winkler visibly enjoyed. "Wanja," she sums up, "is a highly nocturnal person who, after an extensive night's meal, works deep into the morning hours with a love of detail." For instance, she recalls a session "when we worked for an hour on the first bass drum entrance.“

The result is an EP that - despite all the attention to detail, which shows itself in here overlapping, there crossing, but always surprising with the unexpected - captivates with a completely unpretentious, in-depth music and shows a band in a kind of snapshot in a state of emergency. Experiment succeeded.

Spring 2023 Victoriah Szirmai