Fun In The Church 2020s 6 Items

Limited to 100 copies.

Coming-of-age heartbreak madness in 90s indie rock style from the Ruhr area! Here come EAT THEM, ladies and gentlemen. Behind it is the musician Johannes Hofmann, who has recorded more than 20 albums single-handedly to date. And don't worry, Johannes is only in his mid-20s, he just started recording music at the age of 14, which he then burned onto CDs for his grandma to play. A little later: The own Bandcamp account.
Now a kind of best-of collection from the first 10 years of his creative work will be released at the end of June: EAT THEM ALL!

12 tracks on vinyl with a small art zine included. Everything designed by Johannes Hofmann himself.

All songs remastered by Norman Nietzsche. Lo-Fi becomes Hi-Fi Lo-Fi in no time!

The LP is intended as an introduction to the inexhaustible EAT THEM multiverse. Because there is about as much to discover here as on the legendary Shimmy Disc label or the Guided By Voices: indie rock, lo-fi pop, shoegaze, krautrock, math rock, punk rock or heartbreaking power ballads! In the meantime, Johannes has found two colleagues to bring EAT THEM live on stage. Please don't miss this!

As (Tocotronic discoverer) Myriam Brüger recently said so beautifully after the first EAT THEM show in Berlin: “Finally a really uncool band again!” That was actually meant as a big compliment!

In keeping with the holistic aspect of the project - and complementing the band name - titled "ALL", the album covers the full spectrum: from drum machine and sonic youth guitar melange, nervous post-funk to anthemic lo-fi indie -Rock, everything an indie heart desires can be found here.

The first single released today is “Do You Love Me When I’m Dead?”, a catchy song that takes place sonically where it is most beautiful in the rich history of suburban pop: in the garage. The piece reflected the live line-up, which was expanded to include bass and drums. The beat clatters happily and the open guitar chords flow! However, Hofmann transcends the suburbs with reverberated singing about an emotional urge to move and flies into the city, the disco or even through clouds and the landscape.

Initially sparked by a disappointing experience in Los Angeles, EUROPOP is Carl Schilde’s first solo album. Feeling out of place and out of time in the music world, he started to embrace his own limitations, subverting themes like “making it” and pre- internet nostalgia with a Jim O’Rourke- inspired wink in his eye. While holed up in his Toronto basement, a lifelong obsession with outdated pop trickery and yesteryear’s preset sounds launched him into an alternate sonic universe—one where The Beach Boys’ late- 70s albums were big hits, and long-forgotten Italian soft rock is the style du jour.
The resulting ten songs were given their final sheen by mastering impresario Dave Cooley (Tame Impala, Blood Orange, J Dilla).

Born and raised in West Berlin sometime in the 80s, Carl has already had several musical incarnations.
From a Berlin Art Prize nomination for his single-note vinyl record (“The whole concept makes me upset” — VICE), to glimpsing the album charts by co- writing an aging crooner’s magnum opus (“Glamorous” — NY Times), he has always been more interested in exploring different angles than building a career. Since a transcontinental move to Canada, his focus has shifted from the conceptual to the immediate music-making process, with all its imperfections. An avid live performer, Carl is also a member of Playdate, whose album “Manitoulin Tapes” (“a blissed out lo-fi ambient gem” — The Wire) was recently released on Séance Centre.

Following the self-released single TOP 40, which has reached over 130k streams on Spotify, EUROPOP is scheduled to be released on February, 4th, 2022 on Staatsakt’s new interplanetary imprint, Fun In The Church.

Limited to 150 copies in gatefold cover, with bonus instrumental LP.

The regular album is black, the instrumentals are magenta. Mieke Miami's "Montecarlo Magic", the follow-up album to her debut "In the Forest", (2016, Sonar Kollektiv) no longer darkens through the forest, but there is truly no light constraint either. Rather a special, positive mood that radiates inward and outward, describing a state that seems to be inner contemplation and journey at the same time: Florida, California and Brandenburg nestle very close to each other here. Perhaps a river still rattles through the picture and certainly somewhere magicians*innen play with things hide: intoxicated, dreamy and certainly easy to find. Because in this world no one should look around for anything. Find what you want, says Mieke.

Right away the opener "Californio" makes me think of a stay in Los Angeles, an imagined Los Angeles, more imagined than real. Absurd: I was still invited there in February 2020. Silver Lake, in the first light of a new day. Walking along a spring morning, I hear from the garden of a hippie commune this chorus with bright bell piano, space echoes and fine refrain wafting over. "Californio ...". How close it gets to me? Very. I'd like to go back to where this music is playing and realize that this is happening just as much there, in that distant LA at a certain time, as it is in the here and now in me. Beautifully displaced simultaneity. The single "Horse", pre-released at the end of 2020, tells quite a lot about it: bass clarinet and the constant Angerauschte, loose, casual, played. An atmosphere of voices, instruments, delays and, if at all necessary, more painted than planned, the image of a (in itself) polyphonic world.

Unison different: bridges and choirs slipped from front to back, singing sometimes lead sometimes back. Generously overlapping themes, verses, choruses to song worlds. Which you can listen to like this or like that, says the artist. All get into each other, without effort and with horny opacity: Montecarlo Magic.

A confession: yes, I immediately thought, "'Californio' = Los Angeles, garden, world, music, and that hidden yet tangible new humility, hippie USA." I thought all that. But then Mieke tells me about ghost ships, souls and wanderings, and danger? No, it fits. Every dream is true, Yes and No, A and Not-A one: "So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible." '***

Soon this cover version of the Beatles will follow! Who does something like that? "Cry Baby Cry" Maybe the Fab Four in their Los Angeles days? Wiki says India. White album, Lennon on the peak. Supposedly he doesn't like the track later, here it fits. And Mieke Miami becomes, so to speak, for a very brief moment, the most humble John Lennon in the world, and then dreams on, and the band, which is actually herself, dreams itself alongside her.

A record like a garden: "The king was in the garden picking flowers for a friend who came to play." '**. So nice to hear something from John Lennon again and easy translated. Thanks Mieke.

And where I just thought myself listening to Los Angeles and India, doing something mysterious and simple, the record now leads me - via bumper cars and Abbey Road - via London to San Francisco: Swimming Pool. A street-of-Francisco feeling, with guitars and choirs - and soulful grooves that are as oppressive as they are pleasantly dirty. Nix urban soul though, but country road soul, which triggers a crazy wanderlust right now (and far beyond now). And at the same time dissolves it, because whoever listens is amazed - and understands: Brandenburg, Florida, California: It's all here. This melancholic wanderlust likes to blow away completely in the pollen of the places and regions of our desire. More than ever.

The last song: "Golden Ships" is then actually my favorite title, because then I can already start again with this magic music.

Mieke Miami - Montecarlo Magic appears in the second Corona summer on Fun in the Church. Dit fits