HELENA RATKA
Releases
POSE DIA
Chansons for the replicates. Hymns for the algorythmed. Operatic minimal wave. Spoken words. Otherworldly electronica. Oh pop, Oh techno. Oh Pose Dia. Now on R.i.O. simulating herself on an album full of weeping synthlines, melding melodies, unreeling heatre between the notes, camouflaging in fashion and rhyme. Impulsive, destructive, yet so perceptive, gently
repetitive.
“Simulate Yourself” is her second album since “Front View,” released in 2020 on Bureau B. Now the Hamburg-based filmmaker, DJ and musician Helena Ratka, aka Pose Dia, brings a notion of digital archeology. Nine otherworldly chanting cold blooded Lieder and tracks, manic, longing for the real in the unreal. The matter of her poetic-abstract lyrics is
rhizomatic, linking psychological “Suspiria” fantasy with sociology, media theory and all that never obsolete post-structuralism. Hyperreality for the hyped.
Fully illusionistic. Wrapped in touching airs, drilling into cold waving Risiko spheres. X-mal rotating towards novel corners, shading light on old ones. Track make-up transforms into lacquered songs. Fog and fire. Night and light. Hairspray and cigarettes. Pose Dia transfers fine-tuned dissatisfaction to all those fully satisfied. Welcome to the other side of the Ocean.
Simulate Yourself
Out 8.9.2023
Front View
out 9.10.2020
Early demo sessions laid the groundwork for Front View.
"The album was produced in different places between 2018 and 2020, mostly in my studio at home. Some tracks or ideas came to me in Heidelberg and Lübeck, where I was working on music for theatres. My favourite place to work on new pieces is a house in solitude where I can concentrate exclusively on the recording process."
The resulting album takes us on a mysterious journey through a darkish landscape. Pose Dia's tracks assume the most diverse forms – from supercooled synth-wave sounds or the weightless effortlessness of pop on the one hand, to the dsytopian urgency of contemporary club music or flashes of hip-hop on the other. In spite of this panoply of influences and blackwall hitches, the music is never drowned out in a sea of influences, instead the songs radiate a magnetism all of their own. Within the first few sequencer-driven bars of the opening track At The Beach, the listener is well and truly hooked.
The unique quality of Pose Dia's music may owe something to Ratka's pictorial way of working:
"My art is based on the visualization of sound, especially when it comes to the lyrics. The words always follow the sound. I rarely make notes beforehand or use found fragments of poetry. Most of the lyrics materialize in jams, when I'm listening to new music or beats and start making noises with my mouth. Random words which gradually crystallize into a more concrete idea of an abstract story."
These enigmatic stories, sounds, words and voices in the role of instruments help to make Front View into such a kaleidoscopic album, serene and yet tumultuous, minimalist and tender yet capable of exploding in raw anger.
A1Noises
A2Bravo Bravo
A3Make Me Feel
A4I Wish I
A5Soundwall Museum
B1Untitled
B2Untitled
B3Untitled
B4Untitled
B5Untitled
Pro dubbed blue translucent C44 tape in recycled cassette case with recycled cover with a piece of heavy-duty tape.
Edition of 50. No download
Following on from the celebrated first instalment, the second part of The Male Body Will Be Next compiles an entourage of daring sonic experiments, composed in response to bell hooks’ landmark book The Will to Change. Prompting artists and musicians to envision cross-gender solidarity, Osàre! Editions founder Elena Colombi presents an enrapturing, narrative album, conceptualised around collective transformation.
Resonating with hooks’ challenge to men to reclaim the sensitivity that patriarchy denies them, the name of the record arises from a photograph by Peter de Potter and Rebecca Salvadori’s film of the same title. In these depictions, naked flesh is exposed, made vulnerable and trembles with emotion as the fragility of masculine bodies are examined through the queer and female oppositional gaze. Transforming this visual language into musical expression, The Male Body Will Be Next swirls with punk vitriol, electrified noise, acid, electro and free-wheeling encounters charged by love, lust and limerence.
Gently plunking chords signal Pose Dia’s reimagining of lover’s rock before Sissy Fuss smashes in with a heavy-weight instrumental version of their erotic anthem ‘No Restraint’.
Made up of Turkish musician Etkin Çekin and Belarussian songstress Galina Ozeran, God is God delivers a gentle lullaby, while Low End Activist flirts with dark and brooding bass, shattering penetrating frequencies into luminous fragments. Riffing off the 2020 documentary about female early electronica pioneers, Loma Doom crafts a slowly oscillating drone zenith, the ultimate climax. In line with the conceptual underpinning, there are plenty of collaborations – Daytripper’s Riva and Sitar player Tommy Khosla, Lebanese experimentalist NAR and Swiss-French producer John Silvestre (AKA Typhon), as well as Colombi herself and trans author/activist Juno Roche. Within these partnerships, new modalities come alive as mediums, practices and perspectives are ignited and pushed in otherworldly, metamorphic directions.
veröffentlicht am 7. April 2023
SIMULATE YOURSELF
Under her stage name Pose Dia, Hamburg-based musician and video artist Helena Ratka, also known as part of the duo Shari Vari, embarks on a poetic-musical search for the perfect brand. Together with costume designer Gloria Brillowska and video artist Alexander Trattler, she develops a hybrid live show in three parts and faces the question how digital archaeology works. In a multimedia concert performance common codes and visual habits are turned upside down. The focus is on the multi-layered symbolism of clothing in pop culture: camouflage, stylization or political statement? A critical and visionary idea of fashion and pop emerges, with references to popular icons of different eras.
