Myra Davies

The Girl Suite EP/Girls and Cities
Moabit Musik

After three editions of Miasma, her collaboration with musician Gudrun Gut, spoken word artist Myra Davies steps out under her own name for a new full-length CD, Cities and Girls, and an online taster, The Girl Suite EP.

A gifted storyteller, Davies has a dry, knowing and stolidly North American delivery which contrasts sharply with her Europhile leanings. Whereas Miasma explored themes of nature and gender, Davies now turns her eye to the shared culture of girls, working with a range of musical collaborators, including Gut, drawn from Berlin's experimental margins.

On the EP's standout track, “Valkyrie”, Davies celebrates “nine sisters with old German names” over Gut's remix of the operatic classic, “Ride of the Valkyries”. But in this telling, the "horsey girls" become great rebels, riding off on their steeds as the music fades, a Wagnerian nursery rhyme for the 21st century.

Curiously, that piece is omitted from the album, much of which harks back to an uncomfortable past: in “Burroughs' Bunker” Davies makes a visit to the poet's New York dwelling which reminds her of “1956 middle America”, and on “Calgary”, she turns to early 20th century folk songs from the USA and her native Canada.

“My Friend Sherry” is a strange mélange of doo-wop pop, sampled speech and Davies's recitation of a botched abortion leading to a friend's death in the 1960s. It's an ambitious undertaking to turn social commentary into a pop song which is part Four Seasons, part Shangri-Las, but Davies's voice, usually so supple and confident in its delivery, sounds curiously stiff, as if shoehorned into the pop idiom.

In a nod to Miasma's quirky subject matter, “Worm” is a drawling, tongue-in-cheek consideration of the life cycle. Inspired by the sight of a worm stranded on a pavement, Davies draws the listener into her circular musings on Jean Genet and Italian sailors, before returning to the plight of the humble creature, offering it solidarity.

Berlin, so long a source of inspiration for the Davies-Gut partnership, is notable by its absence. Only one piece, the ambient tone poem “Rain”, refers to it, and then only in the press notes. The casual listener would have no idea which city was the subject.

Berlin at least provides fruitful collaborations for the album. In addition to Gut, Davies gets musical backing from Beate Bartel and the pairing of Danielle de Picciotto and Alexander Hacke, all of whom have connections with Einstürzende Neubauten.

Bartel, Gut's former bandmate in Mania D, Matador and Neubauten, provides the music for “Hanoi”, a gentle observational tale of sitting in a café enjoying Vietnamese coffee, while watching humanity pass by on bicycles.

Considering their industrial pedigree, de Picciotto/Hacke's contribution, “STUFF”, is remarkably placid -- a bit of paper rattling, some playful fairground melodies and a few lines pilfered from “My Favourite Things” delivered in a freaky high voice.

Here, Davies delivers her wittiest performance, a comic riff on the human tendency to accumulate STUFF, always taking too much with no place to put it. Her solution to the problem of STUFF is to take it to the landfill because it's the natural conclusion of the production cycle: “Property isn't theft. It's slavery.”

Equally unsentimental is the album closer, the startling “Goodbye Belfast”, in which she bids farewell to an ancestral home she never really knew. Recalling a visit to some Northern Irish great aunts in 1982, Davies repeatedly calls up their attempts at comforting words (“Have a wee cup of tea; you'll feel better”), contrasting this with their unshakeable sectarianism and using this as a metaphor for a place caught in the past.

“Not my place, not my time, not my pain”, she concludes, bidding the city good luck in its quest to move beyond this stagnation.

Girls and Cities is out 26 September.

M is for ...

The independent Berlin label Monika Enterprise is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a hometown gig on 4 November. This seemed an opportune moment to visit label HQ and chat with founder and owner Gudrun Gut, a long-time Berlin mover and shaker.

Having arrived in a still-divided Berlin in the 1970s in order to attend art school (that venerable training ground for musicians--does anyone study art at art school? Anyway...), she has stayed on and continued making music as well as acquiring many quirky artists for the Monika label, Barbara Morgenstern, Quarks and Cobra Killer among them.

Settling down in the kitchen with coffee and cigarettes, Gut, smoky of voice and eye, explained the label ethos: "It is more an artist-orientated label. We do more artist development and every artist has to have their own expression."

In 1997 when the label started, there wasn't much industry interest in the quiet Wohnzimmer scene that produced Morgenstern and Quarks and so Gut, who already ran her reissue label Moabit, turned her attention to new artists. With a handful of releases per year, Monika is a small concern, concentrating on quality rather than quantity.

In addition to solo albums, the label has also produced compilations and the series 4 Women No Cry, with four women artists from different countries. Gut explained, "Each artist has 20 minutes and they have to fit on one album. The idea is we get so many nice demos and lots from women, too, because they know we do lots of female releases."

The internet has proved a fruitful source of talent. "I mostly find the artists on MySpace, actually. It is a really good space for finding new artists."

Recent releases include albums by Milenasong, Chica and the Folder, Michaela Melián and Gut herself. "I was working on it for quite awhile. It was more a question of finishing it 'cause I never had the time." She cleared her throat and continued, "To finish an album you have to have some concentrated time to dive in to it and really finish it."

She works with a small studio set-up: "Oh, it's really simple. A big Mac and a good mic and a good compressor." Highly textured and multi-layered, the record draws from many genres and each song has its own inspiration and dedication. "I wanted it to have not too much of an electronic record. I wanted to have some more... atmosphere."

What with the labels and Ocean Club, her weekly radio show with Thomas Fehlmann, the record was a long time coming but as she explained, Monika pretty much runs itself now. "My assistants can do what I do, more or less, so I could do my own record last year. That was very good. I needed that."

Gut's previous work includes the bands Mania D, Malaria!, and Matador and spoken word collaboration Miasma. The eagle-eyed will spot these names all start with M. She explained: "in the '80s we just did so many projects and to have something in common, we did the M thing. That was really simple. M is for mother, money, moon and it's in the hand. You know, you've got an M in the hand." She held out her hand and one saw that the lines of the palm could be interpreted, by an imaginative art student, as a swirly M. "That's where it comes from," she concluded with a dirty laugh.

Over the last decade Berlin has transformed and Gut welcomes changes to the city, which was something of an island when she arrived. "You couldn't go out. You had the wall around it. You had to pass the borders and it was a pretty tough border crossing.

"Now the last 15 years what's changed the most is business is coming to Berlin. You see people in suits and white collars and we didn't have that before. It's like 'Wow! It's a real city now.' I think it's healthy. It needs that. Because we had it without it and it's a little claustrophobic."

Still, for her Berlin remains a place of boldness and creativity. "Berlin has mostly everything I like because it has this border feeling... The culture is really interesting. It has this underground feel always, kind of daring in the arts. I like that."

Ten Years of Monika, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, 4 November, with live performances by: Chica and the Folder, Gudrun Gut, Michaela Melián, Barbara Morgenstern + short appearances by Quarks, Cobra Killer and Masha Qrella.

Michaela Melián is included in the art exhibit Same same, but different, exploring "minimal deviations from the status quo". Curated by Lena Ziese, it is on at Jet, Memhardstrasse 1, Berlin, through 10 November.