Le-Thanh Ho is releasing her second solo album with "Staub". The poet, singer-songwriter and actress living in Berlin, designs in chanson-like songs surreal worlds, between self-revelation and poetic incantation. Since her school days, she has been playing the EP "Zellophan", followed by her debut album "Elephant" the following year, which has received various prizes and nominations. Now, with "Staub", an album appears which, as an open experiment, gives a completely new direction to Le-Thanh's poetic explorations. Alexander Hacke, a member of the earliest hour and bassist of the Incipient New Buildings, has produced an album that extends far beyond the song format and creates a poetic mixture of recitation, sound sculpture and radio play. The almost static simplicity of Le-Thanh's compositions, which she herself accompanies on an acoustic guitar and piano, represents her an ensemble, which is recruited from the Berlin real-time music / FreeJazz / FreeImprov scene. In addition to her longtime electric guitarist Davide Panza, she has joined the duo Parallel Asteroid, consisting of Gregor Siedl (saxophone and animal voices) and Lan Cao (synthesizer), as well as the sound poets Martin Lau. Instead of relying on the mere musical background, Le-Thanh relies on a dynamic balance of forces that corresponds to the hallucinatory brittleness of her poetry. Quite in the sense of the title, "Staub" is an album that celebrates the friction. Le-Thanh sings, recites and whispers through febrile dreamy fantasies and phantasmagoric memories, which collide with actual sound documents from her childhood and fieldrecordings of her surroundings, creating a world in which poetry and life, interior and exterior, dream and insanity indistinguishable become. Between subtle sound architectures and impulsive crescendi, Le-Thanh, with unrestrained openness, performs her own torn-outness and fragmentation in the universe, celebrating the burglary of the world into the poem and the intrusion of life into music, until it finally explodes and falls into dust.
