Anja Huwe - Xmal Deutschland

Anja Huwe in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://anjahuwe.com/

Musician, artist and former television editor and producer born in Hamburg, Germany, She was the singer and only stable member in the various incarnations of German Post-Punk band X Mal Deutschland. After the band finally split up in 1990, she worked as producer and editor for German "VIVA TV". More recently she has taken up visual arts and exhibits in New York and London.

After Xmal Deutschland’s success with four albums on cult labels such as 4AD, Huwe abandoned music to pursue her visual art career. But leaving her legacy in the past was not so easy.

Invited by her long-time friend Mona Mur, Huwe reconsidered her decades-long hiatus from music and decided to join Mur in her studio in Berlin. Together, they worked for a year and a half, composing, performing and producing the tracks from scratch, which would eventually become the album ‘Codes’. Integral to the overall sound experience was the input of Manuela Rickers who added her famed signature guitar style.

Initially inspired by the diary entries of Moshe Shnitzki, who, at the age of 17, left his home in 1942 to live in the cavernous White Russian forests as a partisan, Codes is about the human experience and what extremes can do to an individual. "The result is a poetic, musical cosmos that encompasses the following themes: forest, fear, pain, loss, violence, and loneliness but also beauty, longing, hope and the will to survive,” Huwe explains. These thematic extremities cause an erraticism to Codes- a passing thunderstorm, a cyclonic burst of nature’s force - but one that exudes anticipation amidst the chill.