We do get the weird and wonderful sent to us to listen to. And then we get songs like this one, ‘Bar Voyage’, by Rasmus Weirup, a Danish musician who commutes between Copenhagen and Berlin.
You know there are so many Nordic musos that have a residency in the German capital that the air routes must be full all the time.
A couple of decades ago I took some time out from my normal employment to do some marketing work for a firm of architects and designers. They were big into bar design at the time when every High Street in the land seemed to have a multitude of them. You’d be hard pressed to find any now.
Anyway I sometimes made suggestions about names for bars but I have to admit Bar Voyage wasn’t one of them. The owners would prefer you to stay put rather than treat your stay as a passing one on a voyage to somewhere else.
But one does exist. The title pays homage to an iconic gay bar called Bar Voyage, in Schöneberg, a Berlin district – “always a good place to begin a night on the town” he says.
This particular bar seems to lie somewhere between the ‘attractions’ of the legendary Berghain (of which we often write here in NMC) and an Agatha Christie or Poirot murder mystery.
Rasmus describes it as “an unorthodox take on a traditional murder ballad.” The storyline has Berlin stamped right through it, with a touch of Nordic Noir as an older man in a bar is seduced and then murdered, his body left in a dirty alley.
To add to the general air of sleaziness, the track was recorded early in the morning, after a night of clubbing in a small rented room in Berlin, using an analogue synthesiser borrowed from a musician friend.
That’s pretty much how I work except I’m in the somewhat less glamourous Oldham.
It’s certainly one of the darkest songs I’ve heard in quite a while, a stylistic mashup of Marc Almond and the Pet Shop Boys, with a storyline that tells a story that could be ‘Bohemian Rhapsody 2.0’ andwith the same direct deftness as The Human League.
(‘Bon Voyage’) – “I was sitting at the bar in the corner café/And this man stepped in just to get out of the rain/I said, hey you, you can sit by my side/And if you buy me a drink then I’ll kiss you goodnight.”
(THL/ ‘Don’t you want me’) – You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar/When I met you/I picked you out, I shook you up/And turned you around/Turned you into someone new”.
The 80s still have a lot to answer for and it is 100% good.
Lyrically, he is very adept at telling a story both comprehensively and minimalistically (again, think of Almond).
It is a short story set to music that might have featured in The Twilight Zone, in which in the course of only two minutes out of six and a half the deed is done, courtesy of a long intro and an even longer mainly instrumental outro. The minimalism resides solely in the storyline.
Hence musically it’s perhaps a little too long, given that nothing happens lyrically for much of it. I was anticipating an unexpected ending that never came and it drags on unnecessarily.
But Rasmus definitely knows how to create atmosphere. The sleaziness oozes it out of it like pus from an open wound while he manipulates words and their meaning smartly, such as the juxtaposition of the silver cross hanging from his neck and the violence in his eyes – “angel and devil completely entwined” – and the instant abandonment of the aims of both parties once they step outside.
If push came to shove and I had to find someone to compare it to it wouldn’t be a musician. Likely it would be Albert Camus. This short story evokes Meursault’s random act of murder of a stranger by a stranger on an Oran beach better than any piece of music I’ve encountered previously.
The Theatre of the Absurd is alive and well in Schöneberg.
‘Bar Voyage’ is the first single from an EP, which will be released in the early spring.
(Continues after the Spotify link)
Find him on:
Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/rasmusweirup/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rasmus.weirup.7/
Bandcamp: https://rasmusweirup.bandcamp.com/
