Top: Dolce & Gabbana (Nightboutique Berlin), Fishnet, stockings and socks: Falke, Boots: Abra
“Sonnenallee” is one of the thirteen tracks in Fucklore, Krista Papista’s new album to be released on July 22, 2022. Its material is the sonic environment of a place at a particular moment: A street in Berlin (Sonnenallee avenue) that is the heart of the city’s Middle Eastern community that beats to the sound of dabke music blasted from cars after the Ramadan. Krista Papista lives nearby. She composed the song in response to the street’s soundscape, using fm and analogue synthesizers, asking her friend Kiki Moorse, one of the founding members of Chicks on Speed, to write the lyrics. In the album, the song is part of a musical and conceptual re-interpretation of notions of the folklore. It is also indicative of how the artist works: in relation to places and in defiance of the mainstream, queering traditions and customs, which she seeks to re-invent often in a collaborative spirit. Of “Sonnenallee,” Krista Papista says that it functions as a shit-show that mixes Middle Eastern and Greek music (sirtaki most prominently) with contemporary electronic rabbit holes. I relate to what she means, when I play the album in my car driving in Nicosia (Cyprus), testing the way her songs perforate the soundscape of her city of origin. The intentional disharmonic blend of sounds and musical references is dizzying, built on tensions between known folk tunes and the electronic. As for the lyrics, they oscillate between the poetic, the absurd and the sexually explicit, sometimes functioning as reflections on our current moment of (political, financial, cultural, and environmental) collapse, melding the personal with the political. In the album’s track list, a song on five hours of period cramps follows a song on the murders of migrant women by an army officer in Cyprus. Their story is most hauntingly evoked in the album’s cover that pictures the dark red waters of a dam that punctuates the landscape like a gigantic open wound. With this in mind, Fucklore is not just an attempt to re-imagine the possibilities of folk music. It is also a protest against tactics of oppression, discrimination and marginalisation that is carried out with forthrightness, unapologetic self-determination and a dildo between the legs. Read more.