Bodi Bill

If you can fit Elon Musk's SpaceX, the self-optimisation madness of the present and the nightly confrontation of new parents with the never-ending energy of the newborn in the very same album, but at the same time leave enough room for your own interpretations, it can only be Bodi Bill’s doing.

Ten years after the last record "What", the Berlin collective around singer and producer Fabian Fenk finally points "back to the future", with eclectic sounds between indie folk and electronica and the futuristic themes on "I Love U I Do".

"I became a father for the first time at the beginning of the pandemic and retreated into a fantasy world," says Fenk. The result is twelve songs that sketch the state of our world like mosaics. "How can I be sure?" sings Fenk in the single of the same name, which has already been released – this search pervades Bodi Bill's new work, and probably always has: the journey is the goal, the question is the answer. Their now fourth album doesn't even want to be one – rather an associative potpourri, thinking out loud, a playlist, if anything.

This openness of meaning is already reflected in the title: "I Love U I Do" – is it an affirmation for the other person? For oneself? Does the apodosis testify to security – or does it expose insecurity? Is it about a person at all – or perhaps about the earth? "I have to keep working at not losing faith that we can still sort things out with our environment," says Fenk. You can feel this preoccupation in the songs. "I Love You, I Do" is a soundtrack to our fluid, fragmentary world – the album to the present.

But since this is Bodi Bill, the whole thing should not be taken in a too earnest way – the project has still retained its very typical irony. In the music video for the single "Loophole Travelling", for example, Fenk and a moustachioed, blond-wigged companion climb out of an excavator shovel (yes!) as two birds of paradise in colourful fringed rags, where they are picked up by an exalted social media addict and dragged through the city on leashes to pose for mobile photos in front of a plastic dinosaur (yes!), among other things, then pushed into a river and finally buried alive in the forest!

The studied graphic designer Fenk, who is responsible for everything visual in addition to the music, once again shows his untamed creativity. And so everything is in flux – including the collaboration with colleagues Anton Feist and Alex Stolze, alongside whom a number of new innovative minds are involved this time, making Bodi Bill less a trio and more a kind of mind map of music-making. And the past ten years have not been idle: The band structure opened up around 2012 when Fabian Fenk and Anton Feist started their duo project The/Das. After the debut album "Freezer" (2014), "Exit Strategies" was released in 2017, about which German music magazine Musikexpress wrote beautifully: "Hauntological techno tenderness for happy hours in bed or at the typewriter." It was a productive period, with Fenk and Feist releasing on Italian label Life and Death and remixing techno duo Tale of Us, among others.

You can hear a similar collective’s force on "I Love U I Do". The ingenious mixture between indie, folk and electronic brought Bodi Bill comparisons with The Notwist or Moderat in the past, but in truth refuses categorisations that no longer fit into our time anyway.

So how does one endure it, the madness of the present? "There's a foul foundation of infinite madness", sings Fenk in "Big Gong Sounds". The song deals with the question: If you go and search for meaning, and I in turn search for you – who will take care of our baby? It is this in-between state that distinguishes Bodi Bill. With their new music, you could get to live in it.