No More Intimate Music
Rio Wolta returns with ‘No More Intimate Music’, delivering a record set between calm and storm, between introversion and extroversion. The intensity of the opus is heart-rending, sometimes filled with pain and a tad darker than his debut ‘Swing For The Nation’ (2015).
The 30-year-old musician fundamentally continues where his debut album stopped, pushing the interplay between ferality and romanticism one step further: ‘No More Intimate Music’ stages the up and downs, the coming and goings of despair and confidence, a dance between anger and euphoria. The songs ever-changing structures, sometimes whipped up by two drummers, sometimes grabbed by absolute silence, intensify that swing. Loud guitar hymns break into sensual ballads while choirs sing themselves into a trance. Each song has its own build-up and lasts as long as it needs to for all to be said. In the case of ‘Intro’, for instance, it means eight minutes. All this lends the record an unforeseeable character holding surprises till the end.
Rio Wolta recorded his second album with Helge van Dyk (Patent Ochsenr a.o) and Daniel Hobi (The Legendary Lightness) in France and Switzerland. Unlike for his debut, the band is accompanying him this time: Fabian Eichin (guitar, synths), Sereina Maria Elmer (vocals), Patrick Wallimann (bass), Patrik Schmid and Mario Kummer (both on drums).
While recording his second album the Zurich based artist has brought his ideas to life in other formats too. With ‘Maschinen’ (2016), ‘Wir haben keine Zeit’ (2017) and ‘Showroom’ (2018) he manages to create productions that can’t seem to be put into one box: something between live concert, theatre, performance art and exhibit. It was his longing for spaces that was decisive for Rio Wolta. Mostly co-produced by the Zurich based theatre ‘Gessnerallee’, he has created these pieces together with the director Piet Baumgartner with whom he has worked for 7 years also collaborating on the award-winning excavator-ballet music-video ‘Through My Street’ (2015).
These productions lead Rio Wolta to foreign countries, specifically to the Far East. In 2017 the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing invited him for a residence and in 2018 Pro Helvetia sent him as the ‘Upcoming Practitioner’ to the Taipei Arts Festival. He combined each stay with a Rio Wolta live tour through China.
It’s no surprise then that the records’ title ‘No More Intimate Music’ is the same as the one chosen for the three live-evenings at the Gessnerallee in Zurich. In the attic of the former horse stable Rio Wolta and his band are showing an alternative to the classic release show performance. Instead songs are performed by six musicians in different spaces, fragmented, repeated and accelerated. Three hours without a beginning nor an end and the audience coming and going as it wishes.