Anyone who hears his voice will never forget it: warm and rough, political and laconic. Karl Neukauf is a songwriter from Berlin, someone who used to drink in the basement bars he sings about. "Hinter Geranien und Gardinen" is the name of his fourth record, an album full of strange and touching stories, collected during the long nights of the capital and on the outskirts of the republic. It tells of loving and missing, of leaving and coming home, of old friends and old ladies, of guys who hang out at the bar somewhere between Bottrop and Hoyerswerda, between Hamburg and Idar-Oberstein.
"Behind Geraniums and Gardinen" is a journey through Germany in 2018, recorded in Berlin and Poland, in East Germany and the Ruhr area. Karl Neukauf's voice catches your ear, and he plays almost everything you hear on the record himself: bass and electric guitar, grand piano and Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes, harmonium and mellotron, there's even a shenai, an Indian oboe. And whenever you think it could be a bit too comfortable, a bit too chanson-like, he stocks up on the instruments, plays on glass bottles, grill grates and tin buckets - and throws lines at you that sound like this: Do it yourself and build yourself a coffin. Paint it, put something in it that you might be able to use later. Karl Neukauf comes from Berlin. Not from the Berlin of hipsters and vegans, but from the Berlin of smokers and poets.
He makes music for adults. Music that doesn't taste like milk froth, but like black coffee.
01 Let's go to the Elbe
02 Fake Enemy #2
03 Say where are you
04 Silence of the night
05 Far far away
06 In this city
07 coffin never never
08 Only pots outside
09 coup de grace option
10 hotel room 304
11 In Morpheus' arms
