Music as Heimkehr

To be honest, I approached Umsonst & Draußen with a little apprehension. I’m not used to listening to pop or rock from Germany, I am not familiar with it except for a quite shallow acquaintance with the music of Kraftwerk and then some awkward 99 Luftballons that descended from the German skies once upon a time. And on top of that the lyrics are in German. I’m always somewhat reticent when it comes to the combination of this after all mainly Anglo Saxon music phenomenon, with lyrics from different language traditions. But then again I love German and its wonderful linguistic expressiveness in philosophy, literature and poetry. So I just started listening…
In my kitchen at first, while I was just rummaging around – I’m never one to sit down intently to listen to a new music work to be discovered. It needs to fit into my world first and foremost. It has to have this curious ability to adapt to my world and to speak to me in a meaningful way. Music for me is not only emotion, it’s most of all meaning and a transcriber of moods, of all the arts the best, the closest I’ve ever encountered in portraying a myriad of possible Stimmungs for which there are often no names to be found. Closeness is essential, ideally something that melts with your skin, penetrates it and finds your soul effortlessly without you even noticing it or being fully aware of it. Those moments are rather rare, but it happened to me out of the blue sky and a little white cloud at a place called Hochmoor. I was absent really, sitting at the living room table when the sounds of this song just drew me into the kitchen again, to my cd player to look at the name of this wonder of a song that had just entered my mind. Hochmoor. It’s been a few weeks now, perhaps even months since that moment of recognition, and I’m still listening to the song every day. It’s become one of my all time favourite songs just like that, from a to me previously unknown singer with an unfamiliar voice singing in a language that I don’t naturally associate with rock or pop music, from an unknown band, originating from a country I seldom visited. Homelessness.

“Philosophy too is motivated by homelessness”, Martin Heidegger writes. And he quotes Novalis: “Philosophy is really homesickness – “Heimweh” -, an urge to be at home everywhere.” Music in all its freedom and expansiveness as no other art refers to a whole world, to our whole world in which we stand and feel often isolated as individuals. When it fulfils its prophecy as an art almost unbridled by material limitations, freely roaming our minds, associating with anything under the sun and beyond, music has the subtlety, intelligence and grandeur to confront us as little, isolated beings with “the whole”, the whole of a world of which we are intrinsically a part, but which will also continue to exist long after we are gone. That’s exactly what Hochmoor enacted for me: a complete world play in ten minutes time. Music as the only – remaining – witness of it all. The song expresses this almost unimaginable idea of how lonely nature must be without a witness or a consciousness that can testify to its sublime presence, how lonely time must be in its eternal flux, a river flowing in the dark, thousands of years without any witness who is capable of making the difference between being and not-being. The beauty of this song is almost too hard to bear, too cruel in the light of man’s ephemeral existence. It touches on one of the essential elements that make this album stand out: Tom Liwa seems to understand better than anyone else that music is the space in which to write about absence – be it only in the form of a lack, loss or want, or in its most absolute sense of death -, or about coming and going, appearing and disappearing, that music like no other art knows how to hint at what’s not there or not there anymore or will cease to be in the future. That music is the perfect metaphor for the time of living, an energy that flows, just as life itself. Tom Liwa sets out a play of presence and absence, a pure dialectic of life and death, the two always intimately connected; the light lustre with which he portrays death in a song called “Dae” is out of this world and his vision is in the best, authentic existentialist sense one that opens you up to being, with not a trace of nihilism to be found for miles. In “Dae”, he even dares to go as far as to reverse the relation of longing: when the earth longs for our presence, only then will we truly dance through life, on the musical energy of life. We are thrown into this world and need to depart from it, and in between we live for ever followed by a pending farewell. Out of this uncanny feeling of homelessness a sort of historical consciousness arises through the music and the words which have become the real observers of nature and time: Tom Liwa and his Flowerpornoes created this kind of medium which from the top of a mountain overviews the knowledge of the most sensitive of muses – Umsonst & Draußen.

The homelessness of music itself is also thematised in both a beautiful and funny way on this album, the mass consumerism of an Anglo Saxon music industry where the universality of one particular language leads to a yawning boredom governed by numbers and money, and indifferent musicians intoxicated and muddled by fame and fortune and global success. A music that seems in great danger of losing most of its inherent qualities like intimacy and truthfulness. 
Intimacy doesn’t equal a small world, as the writer of these crafty, meticulous songs and lyrics demonstrates so well. The title of the song Planetenkind is so relevant in this respect. Tom Liwa leads a little anarchy by way of intimacy which is very refreshing and original. As a “Papa” in the kitchen, for the shortest of moments. Zuhause. 

The album builds its home under the stars, amongst the stars, it zooms in and out effortlessly, in a homely cosmology of solace. It is critical of its world, cynical at times, but it is always furnished with the utmost musical care for detail. Tom Liwa sees music as the time and space where meanings can occur without weighing it down. Quite the contrary, the music imparts a virtuous dedication, lightness, freedom and openness which fill you with joy and awe.The voice and the instruments speak clearly, now and then accompanied by little bells, chimes and pointillistic sounds that evoke a spiritual sense of stillness and awareness. “Wo wird mein neues Zuhause sein?”, maybe the central question of Umsonst & Draußen, is answered within the most beautiful dialogue between question and answer, the latter written in a hopeful, optimistic melody which contrasts so eloquently with its interrogative counterpart. Seldom have I heard such a meaningful, natural and moving way of answering a musical query. An answer which soothes any restless mind in its calming tone, modulation and cadence. Lots of Tom Liwa’s songs open up to let his voice roam freely among the instruments, in an open, wide realm of breath, as a spiritual exercise or ritual which never feels forced, but always intuitive and unaffected. Kuya is a stunning example, a superb instance of a meditative openness to the world and its mystery, a voluntary surrender to a world experience defined by a calm, restorative never ending rhythm which bestows rest. A stone on an altar that could just as well be a kitchen table. Its reprise instantly transforms into a deep awareness of love, a sort of declaration of love in a perfect unity with the universe. It just makes you feel so intensely happy and perfectly comforted. Zeitlos.

In his most personal songs Tom Liwa shows himself a master in preserving the open space of both our inner and outer worlds through his delicate, often sparse and sober music and tender, candid lyrics. A few words, a few notes with lots to hear in between; an incomparable evocative power. “Papa”: five lines only, with one constant: love. Meanwhile the music and words tell of the most poignant sadness in the light of a golden sun captured through fleeting moments. A simple kitchen setting, as the dramaturge performs the most desolate and downhearted act between presence and absence. Or as in “Die Krähe” which reveals itself as an almost naked nearness, in a music silhouette whose contours reach into infinity, into wide and open spaces. The song feels like a sweet fairytale of compassion and wonder, a fable of new beginnings and is an ode to the art of the song and singing itself. Music itself becomes the poet, interpreting sounds of confession, friendship, imagination, solace, escape and beauty in an endless stretch of emotional and physical landscapes merging into one another. Tom is often a metamusician, musing on the art itself; his music adapts spontaneously to his subjects, sometimes in an ironical way, but mostly in a respectful and revelatory way – when Tom is talking about his art, of how it could or should be. That’s how I understand this song – Die Krähe – one of my favourite songs on this album: singing, musing on one’s mistakes. One of the most sensitive lines houses in it: “Wenn Einer sagt, Sie könne nicht singen – Dann hat Er gelogen”. You could of course just call it poetry, but when the words of a poem are chaperoned by a heavenly sequence of notes, something more is happening… their meaning is prolonged into the open air on waves of something undefined. Enigmatic waves of something unspeakable. Kuya returns on the slightest of breezes, I have no idea where it comes from or where it’s going, but it appears just out of nowhere, timid but with an incredible spiritual force. It’s once more this mysterious game of presence and absence, of renewal and return which quintessentially belongs to music … and to life. I keep listening to these songs; for one reason or another I feel at home in them. 

Joke Roelandt, August 2021