13. Various ArtistsMonika Werkstatt
Next to my solo work, this has been the most important project I’ve been involved in for the last couple of years. This for me is an extension of the label work I do with Monika Enterprise. The Monika Werkstatt album is made by a collective of like minded female producers and composers who surround the label [including Beate Bartel, Danielle de Picciotto, Islaja, Pilocka Krach and Sonae].
We do lots of live shows now, real improv stuff, electronic improvisation, four to five people together composing. We just played the Fusion festival, and we did two days at the Jewish Museum for the Gallery Weekend 2019. Four hours of ambient Werkstatt, it’s very interesting. For the live shows we are usually four or five and sometimes we have guests, so this is a really interesting project. I want to continue doing this for the next few years.
For the album, we met up in the studio with 10 producers and we spent three days jamming. And then the producers took the work home and finished one or two tracks, and that’s the album. It’s a double album all mixed by AGF (Antye Greie). So that’s ten musicians and ten producers – it’s the only worldwide release that has 10 female producers on the same record, so I’m pretty proud of it. And I think it’s a great album. We weren’t all playing at the same time. Sometimes we’d do some cooking or some walking, because we recorded it in the countryside, so sometimes there are seven, sometimes two, it depends.
