Naked In The Zoo Gehirnschubladen

"We are Naked in the Zoo, poetry carved into stone, holes cut into the borders that surround our bodies and our consciousness, strong and sensitive, unpredictable. More than ever, in the age of permanent snapshots, we are aware that, like animals, we are much more naked in the zoo - in the spotlight - in the cities, than in nature. If you desire to open a drawer and put us inside, you could call it art brut. surrealist noise. concrete music"

Naked in the Zoo is the latest addition to the Edelfaul roster. After releasing their tape “ruer dans les brancards” in April 2024 on Ignominie Records, they now deliver their first vinyl album of their psychotic poetry carved into noise rock. Starting off on a high energy level, they never let the pressure drop until the end. On the way, their stream of collective consciousness keeps morphing, transitioning, transgressing, wiggling and worming in and out of constellations between Teresa Riemann's broken beats and tortured vocals, while violinist Ruben Tenenbaum enters the noisical areas of his instrument and feeds his own screaming and hollering to the Maelstrom.

The six songs were recorded at Ausland/Berlin, last station of a European tour that took them to Olomouc, Ostrava, Brno and Prague in early 2024. The songs were selected and named by the band, the multitracks mixed by Edelfaul’s resident sound wiz Ilia Gorovitz and mastered for vinyl by Stefan Betke at scape mastering, Berlin.

Teresa Riemann and Ruben Tenenbaum met first at a festival in Copenhagen in 2015. In 2016 they were paired for a joint improvised set by the curators of the „multimars“ Festival in Marseille. Sparks flew, a band was formed, consisting of two musicians that manage to sound like four. Their debut was a self titled live CD on PIS records.

“I am a duo person” admits Teresa Riemann, who has played in various constellations on the Berlin experimental/noise turf. Among other tasks, she has replaced Asja Skrinik (now Pξb) as a vocalist in Balg. Solo, she has mostly performed as a pianist/keyboardist/vocalist until she began to make her energetic solo performances on drums and vocals a priority in 2021. She has since then honed her skills at her cubist trademark style of drumming and simultaneously making up songs.

This instinctive tendency to instant composing went into her ongoing musical relationship with French violinist Ruben Tenenbaum who was, until then, mostly immersed in classical Turkish music - which is to say that sudden changes in time signature don’t scare him. He is now active between composed and improvised, classical Turkish and contemporary experimental worlds, with bands like Kemik Trio (with Vincent Posty and Anıl Eraslan), White trash Kabuki, Ottoman doom trio Ezel as well as ensembles such as Taş Plak Kumpnyası, Mehtap, Zografi, and Tevazu. With Naked in the Zoo, Ruben unleashes the beast that is slumbering in his instrument, entering zones that only few fellow fiddlers have explored. Billy Bang, Leroy Jenkins, and King Crimson’s David Cross come to mind. His vocal contributions form the occasional response to Teresa’s calls, which, along with the pouncing beats and the string textures add up to the illusion of a weirdly familiar, yet unheard form of unhinged, freely floating rock concert.