The Legendary Pink Dots / Leoni Leoni

The Legendary Pink Dots’ inimitable, sky-scrapingly beautiful pop music has always been too mystically transfigured, too sacred and melancholic perhaps, but also too uncompromising to have ever stood a chance with a larger audience. The Pink Dots sound is an organic, somnambulistic, sometimes stirring mixture of electronic pop, psychedelic rock and sometimes noisy experiments. Everything revolves around the characteristic voice of Edward Ka-Spel, that intangible figure somewhere between hobgoblin and prophet.

The Legendary Pink Dots play at Dampfzentrale pretty much every 5 years, and that’s a good thing. Even though it’s actually hard to believe that this British institution has been around for 40 years now and is still touring the world. Their music has remained unique and unmistakable, was never so heavily laden with 1980s references that it could have fallen out of time. Edward Ka-Spel still has one of the most remarkable vocal organs in the pop universe, and even though his counterpart The Silverman has now finally sworn off the rigours of touring, guitarist Erik Drost is a member who helped shape almost the entire second half of the band’s history. The new face on stage is Randall Frazier, who has often played with his project Orbit Service as an opening act for the Pink Dots.

Subtle, sincere, but also strange – Leoni Leoni’s music has a unique, beguiling appeal. The synthesizers hiss, the drum machine moves forward, chugging and thumping. The tones and melodies of her songs are somewhere between wakefulness and dream state, between moving forward and floating. The Bernese musician sings about life, about love, in its banality and magnificence. With 4 self-made cassettes released since 2019, Leoni Leoni has established herself as one of the most important figures of the Swiss pop underground. Quirky bubbling sounds and sleepy vocals are her trademark, as if the term Bedroom Pop was invented especially for her. Unintended noises can be caught, individual sounds are allowed to be crooked and off beat. Some of her songs are structured and tidy, others seem to fray. Even songs with song titles in dialect are consistently sung in English, but the motive remains just as mysterious as the origin of many sounds in their sound cosmos. In any case, it always remains exciting to lose oneself in this micro-universe of warmth and security. The underground of Bern has never been fluffier and more ghostly.

Her first four albums were released exclusively on cassette, the ideal medium for lo-fi music that sounds as if it has sprung from an in-between world. Since her music has been released by the Geneva based label Bongo Joe and has thus also found its way into international channels, her career has been on the rise. For example, she played at last year’s edition of Le Guess Who Festival in Utrecht, Holland, one of the most important European festivals for the avant-garde interpretation of a wide range of pop music.