From a conversation between Emma Stern and Lothar Hempel in Berlin in early March 2022.

Emma Stern: When I listened to your album “Songs for the Blind,” the idea suddenly occurred to me that the recordings might have been made on a mysterious island. As if the whole thing were a kind of message in a bottle sent by people who had run away, lost, disappeared, vanished years ago, but were now sending musical messages to the outside world. I also imagined that your music expressed a very powerful experience. Perhaps something extraordinary had happened and a profound experience had been made? I sensed the presence of feelings that were at once otherworldly, far away, and yet urgent. There is something that wants something from me, that demands something, that knocks at my door. Your music is the opposite of cool. I constantly had the impression that all distance to me as a listener was to be removed, for example through melodies that have something so longing, almost hysterical. As if I were being captured, pulled right into another world, whether I wanted to or not. One could also speak of an almost ambush-like intimacy. What do you say to that, Lothar?

Lothar Hempel: Emma, you have known me for so long. You know that unfortunately I never think strategically, I don't really plan, that I can't really do that, but that things mostly just happen to me. The “it” happens and that my strength lies above all in letting “it” happen. Only when the process is complete do you look at the result and recognize certain forms and structures. It surprises me every time how intentional it looks in retrospect. It was exactly the same with this record. Unfortunately, this music was not created on a lonely island, although we did actually dream of it for a while, but during the recordings we got ourselves worked up into a similar idea, namely that there would be no before and no after, no horizon, no shore, as if time were suspended and there were really only this moment “now” in which our music can sound. This resonance space that was created there is something that has an incredible expanse and yet is very close and concrete. If you can now hear and feel that in the music, then it is good! And then there was something else that almost became a mantra for us. We kept telling ourselves, we want to be completely honest. Honest! Whatever that really means. But it had an effect.

Emma Stern: I can already hear them now, the voices and accusations with which people will react to your music. Escapism, nostalgia, etcetera... you can talk about that, but I am not interested in that at all. What I find moving and much more important is that you stand completely alone with your music. I have thought about it, but I couldn't think of anyone who does even remotely something similar to you. There is something tragic about this loneliness, but also something heroic. And then you also sing in German!

Lothar Hempel: But with a French accent! I think that gives the texts yet another special power, another meaning, that they are sung by a French woman. That too is something that was naturally not planned. Only because Alexandra Matloka and I met by chance and because she is a French woman in Berlin, I was able to write such German texts for her in the first place. And because she comes from the opera world, possibilities opened up and doors opened and music could be created that I could not have imagined before. And because I come from the art world and have my own ideas, Alexandra can sing the way she sings, and so on! So we were cause and effect for each other. Whether all this is so unique, I cannot judge. I actually don't think that is a quality in itself. We simply tried to draw only from ourselves and leave behind everything we knew and understood. We completely gave ourselves over to the illusion that we could start all over again from scratch.

Emma Stern: When listening to the individual pieces, in the end only one comparison remains, namely to film music. Your music, above all the instrumental songs, has a strange, suggestive power that can evoke inner images. If the phrasing were not already too overworked, one could say that you make music for fictional films. A beautiful paradox: your music has something visual! And another thing that struck me: Most of the instruments you hear on the record are electronic, synthetic, simulacra. But you try to reconstruct a natural soundscape from them. There are apparently shepherd flutes, archaic drums, and acoustic guitars. That is like the reversal of a development in electronics, which has actually been about making the digital itself audible for a long time. But you are making folk music again in a funny way.

Lothar Hempel: But we also have a whole lot of actually naturally and analogously played instruments that were recorded live by real people. But you are right, when we made the album, we always had a sound idea of a brittle and bitter simplicity in complex contexts. That became an obsession. There was a real longing for a certain cool and impossible sound, a fixed idea that would no longer let go of us. At some point there was the phrase, I don't even know who it comes from: “artificial intelligence in ancient ruins.” That describes the idea of the tension and attraction between two impossible poles quite well, but still doesn't quite hit it exactly. In some moments of the record, I feel that we were able to implement this idea. Sometimes something flickers up! Sometimes there is something! That then reminds you again of what you actually wanted to do! That is beautiful. The beauty of the impossible. Or impossible beauty (laughs).

Emma Stern: Your band name Nessuno, that has something to do with the Odyssey, doesn't it? Or with Italian films. And the record title is “Songs for the blind,” where does that actually come from and what does it mean? And then there are many crazy song titles, such as “The Girl Nowhere” or “Island Children Exodus.” All this sounds very mysterious and full of associations and references that you don't understand and with which you feel a little left alone. Is that a kind of individual mythology? Where do these words come from?

Lothar Hempel: These words, these fragments, these remnants, yes, of course they all come from our lives as well. That is the private, the subjective, the memory, the trace of the I that condenses there and almost seems mythological. You don't have to understand that and you don't have to explain it. You are supposed to use it, employ it! These words were invented, remembered, they are reshaped, remade, and then brought back into a cycle, for example here, on this record. It is supposed to work and sparkle and be alive. From that, a world of images and words arises that has its own logic. I have been feeding off others my whole life because I needed it. And now I am offering myself up for use! And then there are also the song lyrics, like “City Animals” for example, which have something more closed, which work almost like a fable and tell a story, with a beginning and an end, very classically. These are supposed to be very clear and understandable, almost overly obvious, like in political theater.

Emma Stern: So a man and a woman from Berlin make music together and sing German texts, in all the songs it is about love and relationships and drama. And yet the whole thing has something strangely stylized, yes, almost bodiless, it looks like a shadow play. But then it also becomes hyperreal again, really grabs hold of you, holds you tight and forces you to take a stand. When you describe and hear it like that, it sounds terribly exhausting and aloof and you actually want to run away screaming! But your project is completely different, namely disarming and simple and open and above all really entertaining! And it also has a liberating dimension. Strange...

Lothar Hempel: What you say sounds great, of course. We actually often imagined that we wanted to become figures in a Japanese puppet play, so become part of our own fiction. This idea helped us to free ourselves a little from ourselves, to become even simpler and clearer and more honest. We are really very satisfied and happy with this record, but we are also impatient again and actually want to start the next record right away. Also to expand and deepen what we have already set with this first statement. To build on that and go further. Further! There are still so many ideas and so many possibilities. This is now only a beginning.

Emma Stern: There is one more thing I would like to say. In the song Nebelmenschen, in which you speak a long text, a kind of poem, there is a part where it says:

It is so easy to lie
so clever and free the tongue
Bury my heart in the shadow
that you throw to the ground

I find that in these 4 simple lines is everything that makes up your project, lightness, cleverness and freedom and then the pathos, the tragedy and the wordplay, which dissolves it all again, so that one has to ask, what does all this actually mean now. Lothar, I see your record critically, but I also think it is very good!

Lothar Hempel: Thank you very much, Emma!

* Emma Stern was born in London. She now lives in Nice. In the early 2000s, she ran a bookstore and cinema called HAIL in the Lower East Side in New York. She is a freelance author and documentary filmmaker.