The Space Lady / Leoni Leoni

The career of the now-legendary musician Susan Dietrich, also known as The Space Lady, began during the hippie movement of the 1970s in the streets of San Francisco, where she performed with an old accordion. She later swapped her accordion for a Casio MT-40 keyboard, began feeding her voice through an echo device, and created cover versions of songs like Fly Me to the Moon, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Ghost Riders in the Sky, and Major Tom.

In 1990, Susan Dietrich released her own album The Space Lady: Recorded Live in San Francisco, a cassette featuring her pop covers and some original compositions by her husband, Joel Dunsany—including Synthesize Me, a song that would go on to achieve cult status.

The Space Lady’s psychedelic and ethereal take on pop music, along with her trademark winged helmet, has since become widely known. Since 2015, after a 20-year hiatus, the musician has returned to touring—this time with a stop at the Dampfzentrale in Bern.

Leoni Leoni’s music has a unique, beguiling appeal. The synthesizers hiss, the drum machine moves forward, chugging and throbbing. The sounds and melodies of her songs are located somewhere between being awake and dreaming, between moving forward and floating. The musician from Bern sings about life, about love, in all its banality and magnificence. With 4 self-made cassettes released since 2019, Leoni Leoni has established herself as one of the most important figures in the Swiss pop underground. Weird bubbling sounds and sleepy vocals are her trademark, as if the term bedroom pop had been invented especially for her. Unintentional noises can be caught, individual sounds may be crooked and off the beat. Some of her songs are well-structured and tidy, others seem to fray. Even songs with titles in Swiss German are consistently sung in English, but the reason for this 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.