Big sensation – fans of Radio Citizen watch out:
“Lost & Found” presents unreleased material from Bajka and Niko Schabel, famous for their hits “The Hop” and “Summertime” with fans all over the world.
This record is a dive into the history of Radio Citizen´s early Berlin days and in spite of all the time gone by this album sounds as edgy and fresh as “Berlin Serengeti” and “Hope and Despair” from the years 2006 and 2010.
Radio Citizen is a project by mastermind Niko Schabel and a group of musicians from Berlin and Munich, including Marja Burchard (Embryo), Wolfi Schlick (Express Brass Band) and Johannes Schleiermacher (Training, Shake Stew with Shabaka). Musically diverse, it had been tagged:
deep krautjazz dubecho clubculture electric arcadia free soul. So far so good.
Bajka is a singer with a distinctive voice that reminds in some ways of Billie Holiday and Erykah Badu.
Apart from Radio Citizen she worked with Beanfield (check out the Carl Craig remix), Bonobo and many others.
“Lost & Found” starts with a meditative tune, “World of Peace”, based on a heavy beat made on the MPC by Matze Sajjaa aka Masajjaa. Niko Schabel cut it up, rearranged it and overdubbed the flute in his first studio in the Storkower Strasse Berlin, a kind of industrial poor poets home with rain dripping through the roof.
“Seashores of the Eye” is a simple repetitive yet catchy groove and one of the earliest and most cheerful collaborations of Bajka and Niko Schabel. An alternative draft to the minimal techno that ruled Berlin at the same time!
The album gains momentum with a cover of the Poets of Rhythm tune“Upper Class”, notable for Wolfi Schlicks wild and playful flute solo. Long ago Niko Schabel was invited as a guest to record with the Poets crew in a house in Bushwick New York that is now the Daptone studio, having Thanksgiving dinner with Quantic where a few years later Amie Winehouse would record “Back to Black”.
This is where he and Bajka decided to work together. She´s featured in the next piece: “Eastern Sun” which foreshadows Schabels emerging fascination with indian music. Today he is playing with world class musicians like legendary south indian singer Ramamani and north indian sitar pandit Deobrat Mishra.
“Mountains” is drenched by Fernweh, an untranslatable German word meaning ‘longing for the far away´. A calm soundscape composed by Niko Schabel in the quiet of an old wooden lodge in the Alps contrasted with the electrifying electric sax by Wolfi Schlick.
On to the next side of the record which brings us the cinemascopic size of the second Radio Citizen album, “Hope & Despair”: The atmosphere changes into an urban big city buzz in “Rule No One” and supports Bajkas laid back anarchic lyrics: “Best is you rule no-one and nobody rules you”
“New York City Beat” combines Julian Waiblinger´s vibrantly elegant drums with a big bold 808.
This drum machine was borrowed 1999 from Zombie Nation, so maybe this is the earliest song of the record! The combination of samples and live instruments has long been the hallmark of RC.
In “Going Down” the mood gets darker, its huge reverb was recorded in an old empty brewery in Berlin Stromstrasse, a once incredible space now transformed into a shoping mall. Those were the days, Berlin!
“One Eyed” chills down the urban tension with soothing afrobeat featuring the thriving sound of drummer Julian Waiblinger plus the “classic” hornsection: Wolfi Schlick on flute, Teresa Gruber on trombone and Niko Schabel on sax and bass clarinet. This piece was originally a remix made for Deela but only the Radio Citizen parts remained.
The album closes with “Slow Living”, a brooding, meditative piece out of the soundtrack of the Film “The Last Catch”, a documentary of about the extinction of Tuna Fish in the Mediterranean.
Eerie string echos by Klaus Janek and beautiful mallet work by drummer Matthias Gmelin spice up the heavy electronic drums, showing us some direction for the music Radio Citizen coming in the next decade, but this is another story for another day….
