Discover the artistThe Moon Is No Door is the new band spearheaded by the composer and singer/songwriter Stepha Schweiger, a familiar name thanks to her experimental musical theatre work and productions with Pyrolator and Hanno Leichtmann. Expanded to the four-piece band The Moon Is No Door, this album follows on from two solo albums dedicated to the poetry of Katherine Mansfield. However, it takes a new musical direction because, according to Schweiger, “the new selection from Mansfield’s texts needed a band that sounded harder, edgier and more krauty, plus I had a huge longing to do something with familiar band members again.”
Eight of the album’s nine songs are based on poems and literary still-lifes by the NewZealand-British author Katherine Mansfield, all of which are still relevant to this day. “I immediately identified with these lyrics on a very emotional level,”says Stepha Schweiger, “as if they came from deep within me. And then I felt the irrepressible urge to sing and play them”. In the psychedelic, krautrock musical settings, which are heavily influenced by both indie pop and improvisational avant-garde, the moon is no door create fictional scenarios and dialogues with multiple vocal inserts in the form of collages.
The core of the band consists of Stepha Schweiger on vocals, synthesizer and piano, Adam Goodwin on double bass, Robert Pöschl (Robert Forster, Kim Foley) on electric bass and Mäx Huber (Walter Salas-Humara, Kim Foley) on drums. There are also guest appearances by Ulrich Krieger (Lou Reed) on saxophone and Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) on “processed” electric guitar along with Christian Haudej on electric guitar. The Moon Is No Door came into being over the course of several sessions with Schweiger’s long-time musical associates. It all kicked off with Stepha Schweiger and Adam Goodwin, who then brought robert Pöschl and Mäx Huber on board, with whom Stepha also collaborates in the group “Girl on Catfish”. Stepha and robert know each other since their teens. Both of them played together for five years with the forerunner bands and then in the resulting formation of “Baby You Know”.
On Tiny Moment, Stepha Schweiger amalgamates poems by Katherine Mansfield and excerpts of a Virginia Woolf text with her own compositions to create exciting, absurd and even magical-sounding songs. With regard to her approach, Schweiger has the following to say: “I don’t just want to create an embellishment to a poem, but initially aim to create a musical antithesis that coalesces as much as possiblewith the poem. With this in place, I can in turn look at the poem, feel it, hear it, understand it and, in the process, realise something new every time, also about the poem itself. This is a reciprocal composition process of convergence between music and text. As a result of identifying the largest deviation and the strongest possible confluence between music and text, the composition ultimately emerges in the most autonomous manner imaginable.”
More than a century ago, Katherine Mansfield already created a self-determined modus vivendi forherself, on both a private and professional level. This sense of autonomy is reflected in her literary output. The tracks dive into the topics ofself-perception as a woman in society, finding a haven in various relationshipsand perceiving the significance of nature. The album’s title track deals with atiny but enchanted moment during the twilight hours when suddenly a spooky element appears in the air, transforming everything into a minor miracle andconferring magic on the perception of oneself and one’s surroundings. Incontrast, “Gray’s Inn Road” is about pilgrims striving to reach nowhere – is ita “Road to Nowhere” or does it actually lead to a destination? ...
