I think I’ve become much more open. I now let a lot more of my original project into ENPAL. Probably hardly anyone knows it. It has around forty monthly listeners. But I’ve actually been making this kind of music since I was fifteen. I used to police those influences quite aggressively. I thought ENPAL had to remain completely separate from my other project. Now I don’t filter an idea simply because it might not fit the project or because someone might not understand it. If it sounds good to me, I let it in. That makes me much freer, and I think it works better. In the beginning, some of the songs were quite ironic, even a little gag-driven. That has changed. I take the whole thing more seriously now.

I think ENPAL grew out of collaborations almost by accident. The project probably started shortly before the pandemic. I made the first song in one afternoon and sent it to a friend as a joke. She said it was good, so I uploaded it. That’s how I got in touch with SALÒ. Shortly afterwards, we made a song together and I was able to play live with ENPAL for the first time, as support for SALÒ in Berlin. I simply wrote to MC WINDHUND after hearing a few of his tracks. That was shortly before he really took off. We met in Berlin, spent a few sessions in the studio together, and a pretty close friendship came out of it. I met Urbannino through SALÒ. We’ve been making things together on and off for the last three or four years. There was no real strategy behind any of it. I wasn’t thinking about who was famous or what a feature might do for me. It was more about whether something good could grow out of it, whether the song would work, and whether there was something beyond the song as well.

I’m making fewer features now and choosing them more deliberately. The sound has to fit, but you also have to be able to do something with the people outside of the track. One thing I really appreciate about MC WINDHUND, for example, is that he actually brings people along. There are always five, six, seven people together at his concerts. You have to give him credit for that.

The first impulse was frustration. At the beginning of the year, I locked myself in at Funkhaus for a month to make a new EP, while normal life continued outside. I think a lot of people who make music and aren’t part of some huge genre or apparatus know that feeling: your regular life doesn’t stop just because you are trying to make something. I had overthought what the EP had to be, partly because I had put so much work into the previous one. I’m not a perfectionist, but everything has to be organised and have some kind of structure. With this EP, that didn’t really work. At first I thought it was going well. Then, a week later, I listened back to everything and thought: this is all shit. At some point I just wanted to leave Funkhaus. I had this small internal outburst and thought: that’s it, I’ve got a screw loose. That’s where the song came from.

“Today I don’t care about anything” and “today I’m calling God and everyone else,” those are ordinary moments. For some people, they might be connected to alcohol or drugs, to the idea of simply saying: fuck everything. But I wanted to make a song that also works when you’re on your way to work and have no energy left. A song that allows you to let go without turning that release into something destructive. The live aspect was part of the thought from the beginning. I wanted to make a song that gives you permission to say: today it’s just about me. Today I’m leaving myself alone. There is also a positive version of having a screw loose. Not the ugly version where someone says you have a screw loose and means that something is wrong with you. More the version where some random old guy tells you: you’ve got a screw loose. And you think: yeah, great. That was the idea.

The video was supposed to convey the song’s energy without showing me all the time. I don’t really like seeing myself in videos. I hate it. At the same time, it is obviously useful to appear in a video for your own song. We wanted the cuts to be as fast as possible. My face shouldn’t stay on screen for too long, and no shot should settle for too long either. The aim was to move the stage energy I’m trying to create with the song into the edit. There is a lot of inner pressure and hectic energy in it. Even when I talk about the song, my hands start clenching. That was the feeling I wanted to get across: fast, tense, overloaded, as much energy as possible without it becoming ridiculous. The moments with my face weren’t consciously chosen as symbols. They are more like fragments inside all that movement. The main thing was to keep the cuts fast and get as much energy into the video as possible. Ideally, it should feel slightly uncomfortable, but also cathartic. You should watch it and come out feeling charged yourself.

When I was asked to play the opening, I first wondered whether I had to recalibrate the set. Should I play quieter songs? Should I turn it into more of a performance? I talked about it with friends and with Lukas, my DJ and producer.

Then I thought: it should be the exact opposite. It’s going to be a completely normal ENPAL concert. No performance that people first have to decode, and no set that is artificially adapted to the audience or the art context. The audience shouldn’t have to adapt to me. That would be incredibly presumptuous. When something is announced as a performance, people sometimes become self-conscious. They think: I wouldn’t dance to this, or I wouldn’t completely let go here. With a concert, the social contract is simpler. You can come, dance, be loud and have a good time. So at Art Biesenthal it will be a normal ENPAL show, just with an extra layer of pressure. Very loud, with a lot of light and a lot of energy. People shouldn’t be thinking: who is watching me right now? Or: is it appropriate for me to dance? Ideally, it should feel more like a concert in some Berlin dive bar or in Hamburg than like a situation where everyone is wondering how to behave at a performance. It doesn’t matter what job you have or who you know. You should just be able to have a good time and go to a concert.

I obviously know what a vacuum is, but first of all it’s an airless space. And I think you can see it in two different ways. Either this airless space is protected, for example, at a concert, where people are in a protected space for a moment. Without outside pressure, without some system from the outside, without fears or whatever.

A pressureless room, basically. I don’t know if that’s a thing you can say. For me, a concert is a vacuum. It is protected from the bad air outside, from outside influences. It becomes about the people who are there, how they are feeling, maybe even their souls. That sounds a bit pathetic, but they should be protected there for a short moment and be able to let go. Even if it’s only forty minutes inside the ENPAL vacuum. You could also look at vacuum negatively: an airless space is stillness. But I don’t want to interpret it that way, because that would be a bit too obvious and too simple. For me, an ENPAL concert is more like a space where people are protected from the negative influences outside, physically, let’s assume that, but also mentally and spiritually. And you can bring in the idea of vacuum-sealing as well. Meat or other food is protected from the air so it lasts longer. We are flesh people too. Maybe, in the end, it’s about lasting a little longer. That’s probably a stupid way of putting it, but I think you could say it.