Category: Germany trip April 2022

Day 2

It was a sunny Tuesday morning in Cottbus, Nick and I went for a short walk down by the river and spotted some red squirrels and a deer before returning in time for our 10am breakfast meeting. We all did covid tests as we felt nervous we might be struck in some other way by this interfering infectious virus! We were luckily all negative, so over breakfast reflected on the previous day and tried to focus on what we would do for the day – one thing we all agreed on is that we would take a break in the middle of the day, as yesterday we had just worked all day! We knew that in the afternoon Stefan (artist name is Stoi), a rapper who writes in German and Sorbian would be coming and we wanted him to put some verses down so Sophia decided to continue working on her beats, while Nick recorded another Sorbian melody with Paul on violin.

 

Postering around Cottbus

While the others were busy working on music, Hella (from kollektiwwakuum) and I discussed how we both felt there was great things happening in Sorbian and Welsh culture at the moment. Somehow it feels like we can embrace our minority cultures whilst also being feminist, queer, anti-authoritarian etc. The previous night we had been discussing some of the (sometimes extremely) problematic themes of some of the lyrics of the old songs from Paul’s grandmother’s Sorbian songbook – lyrics such as “you won’t need any water ever again because you will cry so much when you marry me” and suggesting to hitting women once they marry you, Sophia had got inspired by how fucked up they were and decided she would like to rap over the melody of the song (which Nick had added beats to), with a new feminist version. As there were a lot of Sorbian rappers getting involved, I really felt we needed some Welsh rap too – I knew who I needed to contact. The amazing Izzy Rabey, I knew she could fit into the project perfectly because of her feminist and queer background – I sent her a quick message and she immediately replied saying she was keen! I sent her over a beat to see if she liked it and she said she did so I added some vocals to the chorous and Nick and I made a new arrangement of the song and sent it back to her. The song had a kind of middle-Europe, middle-ages vibe due to the Sorbian melody, so as we’d been discussing myths of Sorbian region and Wales earlier in the day, the lyrics of the chorous I created were about how the heroes in our myths are always men, and that I wanted to hear about the witches and resisters not the ones who upheld hierarchy. By this morning [Wednesday] Izzy had replied with 16 bars of awesome verses on a similar theme about the Mabinogi.

 

A Sorbian song book from GDR Times

We took an afternoon break by heading to Hella’s mum’s shop which sells over 250 variations of tea, we saw a bit more of the town and postered our gig on Saturday where we will showcase some of the stuff we’ve come up with. When we came back to our studio space, Stoi soon joined with us and Nick played him some of the beats/tracks we had which he could contribute to. Sophia and Stoi decided to go and brainstorm together and ended up creating a kind-of battle rap between upper and lower Sorbian (which are two different languages), which they informed me had never really spoken to each other in previous generations as they considered each other so different and had so many prejudices against each other. They spent the evening writing and practicing their verses. I was also in touch with Cerys to see if her covid tests were negative yet but unfortunately they weren’t, it seems less and less likely that she will join us here but on the other hand Gregor from the band Serbska Reja had been on a hunt around Cottbus musicians searching for a harp we could hire/borrow and had found a celtic harp we could borrow for two days! If she doesn’t end up coming we have left space in songs for her to add when we’re back in the UK, and also still have some beats we think harp could be added to.

 

For dinner Paul made us another Sorbian special dish – Kartoffeln mit Quark (and even made a vegan version for me). It was super tasty. Just before we went to bed, Paul recorded one last violin part of an original song of his which he wanted Maja from KollektiwWakuum to sing on tomorrow.

 

 

We are very excited to announce that thanks to the Arts Council Wales International Opportunities Fund, we are working on a project with Sorbian musicians in Germany! Efa Supertramp and Cerys Hafana will be travelling with Chwalaw producer and electronic musician Nick Ronin to Germany at the end of April for a residency in Chóśebuz/Cottbus – where we will be jamming, recording and creating songs through our minority languages Welsh and Sorbian! Expect traditional instruments combined with electronic elements and experiments – we’re going to enjoy the creative process and see what we come up with. This blog will document what we get up to, but first I’ll tell you a bit more about how the project came to be.

Efa Supertramp + Geigerzähler performing in Bethesda in 2019 (Photo by Neil Crud)

So how did the idea for this Sorbian/Welsh project come about?

In my teenage years, I played in a Welsh-language punk band called The Stilletoes and in my 20s started performing solo as Efa Supertramp. I travelled all across Europe playing in autonomous spaces and squats; making connections with activists and musicians wherever I went. In 2018, in an anarchist squat bar in Berlin, I was performing under my folk-punk alias and I met a violinist who performs under the name Geigerzähler. He was thrilled that I was singing in Welsh because he also spoke a minority-language from East Germany called Sorbian. We bonded immediately as two individuals who are part of a wider-European anarchist punk scene but passionate about our languages and cultures. Both myself and Geigerzähler use our music to support activist causes, such as anti-gentrification protests or refugee solidarity events. We both also create music in our minority mother-tongue languages and play it proudly and loudly across the dominant states we live in – UK and Germany.

The Sorbs make their home in the Brandenburg-Saxony region of Germany, not far from the capital Berlin. Around 60,000 Sorbs live there today. At the beginning of the last century, Sorbian was still the most-widely heard language in many areas of Brandenburg and Saxony but that changed during the years of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. The Nazis strictly forbid the Sorbs to use their language. Sorbian clubs, books, dancing and even church services held in the language were banned; Sorb teachers were expelled from the region and Sorb anti-fascists were murdered or sent to concentration camps.

Geigerzähler was born while Berlin was still divided – in a small town called Budyšin (or Bautzen in German). He was quickly thrown into the educational system of the GDR and had to learn the violin, and became an extremely competent musician. After the wall came down, he cut himself a mohawk, quit school and started an apprenticeship as squatter; which unfortunately was halted by the riot police. His violin was destroyed, but he quickly got a new one because he wanted to play punk and didn’t want to learn to play the guitar….

In 2019 Geigerzähler and I (Efa Supertramp) organised a tour together where we performed seven dates across England and Wales (the Welsh concerts were in Bethesda, Cardigan and Newport). Each night we performed in a total of four languages (Welsh, Sorbian, English and German). Ever since our first tour together, Geigerzähler has wanted to invite me to come and perform in the Sorbian region. However due to coronavirus this has not yet been possible and, of course, the world has changed a lot for musicians and we’ve had to find new ways of working! I’m so happy that thanks to Arts Council Wales International Opportunities Fund, this is finally happening and I get to spend 5 days creating with Sorbian musicians. Our collaborators from the Sorbian region have also got another grant which means we will return in the Autumn to perform some of the songs from the project live! We will be working with members of kolektiwWakuum from Cottbus who are supporting us by providing a space and some film-makers to document some of what we get up to. I’m really looking forward to being in a room of people, enjoying the creative process and just seeing what we come up with. We have been meeting on Zoom to start organising this week of music-making!