At one point, loser Jimmy McGill became cunning freestyle lawyer Saul Goodman; that was around 2005, in the prequel to the TV series Breaking Bad. At one point Lizzy Grant from the trailer park became singer Lana Del Rey. That was around 2011, before her musical breakthrough with the album Born To Die. In an interview for Vogue she explained: "I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. Lana Del Rey reminded me of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue."

And today, in 2020, Mei-Siang Chou, who already performed on stage as a singer behind Bobby McFerrin and Anastacia, becomes the solo artist Meira Loom, who delights the world with her own songs in the field of soul, neo soul and jazz and who may be considered - without exaggeration - as one of the best voices in Switzerland. But who is Meira Loom actually? And how does someone come to call herself that way?

​We start our search for Meira Loom on www.baby-vornamen.de, a German website for baby names. Meira, it is said here, is the one who comes from the light, the enlightened one. Elsewhere, Meira is equated with the star of the ocean or simply seen as the short form of the Spanish maravillosa and translated as “wonderful”. Visitors to the website associate the name Meira with modern, attractive and successful. So far so good, with her first name, Meira Loom is on the safe side.
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​Things get more complicated with Loom. In English, to loom stands for something threatening that comes up and then hangs over you. Thunderclouds for example, or even a UFO. However: Who would object to a star of the ocean hanging over him or her? "Loom combined with Meira, I found the vowel-color combination very harmonious (ei & a & oo)”, says Meira Loom. "So it was more of an acoustic composition than a content-based one. Just like music. Moreover, Loom is also one of my favorite songs by Ani di Franco.”

As a child, Mei-Siang Chou practiced the hurdles in the garden for hours and jumped 5.10 meters in the long jump (as a left-footer!). Other biographical facts from her youth are no longer relevant today to explain Meira Loom. Was she able to do handstands as a child? Was she good at grammar? Did she never miss an episode of the Mini Playback Show? Why would that still matter today?

​Meira Loom lives in Berne these days, is a singer and musician and finds her resting pulse when she sits down by the Aare river and looks into the depths of the water. She now understands what she is able to achieve as an artist. Now she dares to try things that she didn’t dare to do before. Before that, self-doubt accompanied her on her path and prevented her from reaching her full potential. Of course, making art is always a risk, Meira Loom is aware of that. Those who are creative expose themselves to criticism and risk not pleasing everyone. But she has dropped her fears of failing, has become courageous and persistently aims at her newly defined goals. Instead of the Café Marta in Berne, she now doesn’t mind to go as far as the Royal Albert Hall in London. As with Lana Del Rey, the art figure Meira Loom is increasingly becoming a real figure, the only figure. The name becomes the program.

The reason for Meira Loom's transformation is her debut album Letting Go, which was released on August 28, 2020. The album contains eleven carefully arranged tracks that she wrote herself, with one exception. Where Lana Del Rey's Born To Die is melodramatic and sad in a certain way, as the title suggests, Letting Go is an invitation to a self-determined life. Meira Loom sings about letting go and self-indulgence, and about toxic relationships and outdated obsessions that she leaves behind. “My former comfort zones are worthless today,” she says. “they are well past their expiration date.”
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​Meira Loom recorded her album at home in her studio. She brought the baby into the world almost all by herself - but that doesn't mean that she became a single mother. The child and her mother are cared for from different sides and enjoy a very happy time. In the process, Meira Loom has even learned to appreciate teamwork. Sure, here and there, one would have wished that the album had been produced with a richer sound. Letting Go was created with the "moyens de bord", as the French say, with the means available. Hence it is above all a statement for Meira Loom's versatile voice, which can burn powerfully, with no restrictions, only to caress the ear right afterwards, gently and velvety. When someone moves out of his or her home, like Meira Loom, who now moves out of Mei-Siang Chou, this person doesn’t usually move into a five-room apartment with two bathrooms right away. That has to develop.
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"There is enough for everyone - including myself" is what Meira Loom conjures up on her debut album and these lines are symbolic of her new mindset. There is enough talent in the world and Meira Loom has got a lot of it. There is enough love in the world and a lot of it goes to Berne: because of Meira Loom and for Letting Go.
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The sphere is an important image when Paradisco talk about their music, especially for Lea. If you think of a glittering disco ball, you're missing the point again, as I did at the beginning of my acquaintance with Paradisco. "The sphere," says Lea, "parabolically stands for an emotion that we want to convey, a conscious, intense feeling." "We want to draw our listeners into the sphere and offer them a new world," Katharina adds.

A new world in which love would probably be the priority state. "Love is my lifestyle" is the title of Paradisco's first album, released in 2019. (In female understatement, Paradisco call their record "an EP", even though it contains six songs and all of them are better than the life's work of many a highly hyped artist). Yes, love is our motto, say Paradisco, and we try to live it every day anew. It's a deliberate decision to go through life like this, says Lea, but there are also difficult moments when you reach your limits. "But we have chosen to be brave, without thinking that in the end it all hurts."

The disco has been the scene of many heartache moments. But here we are dealing with Paradisco, the disco next to the disco, the disco that is not a real disco but something on the other side of the street. (For linguists: Para is a Greek prefix and can be translated as "at", "besides" or "beyond".) Let's explain the Paradisco principle using the example of "Two Old Stones", the band's brand new video. The song begins with the ostensibly unsuspicious lyrics "I told my mom about you; I said that you are no good for me.”​

"Is that what a woman does," I ask Lea and Katharina, "to bitch to her mother about the awful boyfriend?”

"It's a bad relationship," says Katharina, "so bad that I have to tell my mom."

"The song is also meant to be ironic," says Lea, "but if you tell your mom, it clearly has a certain significance."

"I told my shrink about you, just didn't go over the tongue well," Katharina points out.

​Then Lea reaches out to swing big. "The song also has something repetitive, we use this as a stylistic device," she says. “But it's also about standards. Who says a norm is a norm? Is it society and what if you break the norms and change the order? What if you break out?

"Now these are bigger questions than I would have guessed from the lyrics," I admit.​

"That's precisely Paradisco. A smooth surface, but it's got philosophy underneath!"
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Where do Paradisco want go with their band and music? In any case, we want to continue, say Lea and Katharina in unison, our project springs from an inner necessity. As a result of their love as a lifestyle, Paradisco also get a lot of love back. They like to cooperate with other arts and artists and are often contacted because of that. "People feel like joining in with us."

A feeling that is not foreign to Charlotte Gainsbourg, a musical favorite of Lea and Katharina. In one of her songs she defined the Paradisco principle as follows: "In Paradiscos, we're confined to only pleasure; When you're a flame, you'll burn forever." Whether up or down, the escalator to the eternal jive - as one of the possible travel destinations - goes on and on for Lea Heimann, Katharina Reidy and Paradisco.

Listen to "Love is my lifestyle" on Bandcamp here. 

​His numbers on Spotify are very modest. When I talk to Andrea Kaiser, who is just Kaiser to most people, I tell him that he has ten monthly listeners on Spotify (and one of them is me). That’s awesome, Kaiser replies, I’d love to send everyone of them a bouquet of flowers.

Catering to the masses has never been Kaiser’s goal when making music. In fact he would change his musical style immediately should this style ever become mainstream and enjoy commercial success. In October of 2019, one month after the release of his latest album Songs of No Return, this is not a particular risk. Kaiser is the founder and at present the only member of Dnepr, a band that started its career deep down in Bern’s underground music scene of the 1980ies and has not moved up considerably since then. (And yes, there used to be an underground scene in Switzerland.)

​Do you still talk about the 1980ies?, I ask Kaiser. Sure, he says, when I’m asked. Kaiser’s memories of the starting years of his career are still very much vivid. Between 1987 and 1995 he had released a bunch of six records and he still remembers every detail about each of these songs. Dnepr combined Kaiser’s heavy guitar - sometimes rhythmic, sometimes gloomy and plaintive - with elements from post punk, prog rock and new wave. The intention was always to be provocative, with a distinct nihilistic attitude, and play with political buzzwords in a period when the cold war was still fully on. Dnepr is a great motorbike brand from Ukraine, Kaiser tells me, and I wanted a name for my band with an eastern, communist touch.

Dnepr’s first album was called Hymn of Nihilon and it was inspired by Alan Sillitoe’s novel “Travels in Nihilon” where a group of people is sent to the country of Nihilon to collect information for a new travel guide. In Nihilon honesty is outlawed, drunk driving is mandatory and nihilism reigns supreme. TV and radio news are announced with “Here are the lies!”. These are just the kind of subversive ideas that Kaiser loves. All of Dnepr’s albums were recorded in Nihilitz Studios at Ulaanbaatar; Nihilitz being the drink that Nihilon’s citizens usually drink and Ulaanbaatar the capital of Mongolia, a former hidden treasure of a communist-ruled country. In reality Kaiser’s studio is just a small room in the basement of his apartment in Bern, just big enough for him and his guitar. Kaiser has never traveled to Ulaanbaatar.
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​While Dnepr’s music is purely instrumental now, there were lyrics in the first period of Dnepr. Have you lost your inspiration for words?, I ask Kaiser. Not at all, he replies, I never had troubles expressing myself. It’s just that I find it more challenging these days, but also more of a thrill, to produce music without lyrics. With lyrics, you can repeat them over and over again and you have a song. Without lyrics, your compositions need to be constructed differently in order to keep the song going and the audience listening.

Dnepr has always been avant-garde. For “Figures in a Landscape” from Hellhome, Dnepr’s 1993 release, a computer generated voice spoke words that had been fed to the computer by Kaiser (by profession, Kaiser is a software engineer). “Deus Ex Machina” and “The Nile Song” (both from Vandalism, 1991) are similar adventures in sound. Other songs on Vandalism - “The definitive Birth, the ultimate Life and the absolute Death”, as well as “Come back (I want to kick into your ass)”- definitely excel through their innovative titles, one profound and one more than subtly funny. By comparison, The Empire Strikes Back from 1990 is a rather conventional album, with music that can be qualified as industrial heavy metal based on piercing guitar riffs.

​What did stop you from becoming as big as Metallica?, I ask Kaiser, because you certainly had the talent. Well, I don’t know, says Kaiser, always the humble man. It also has to do with luck. You need to be young to start such a career, to make it big. Music consumers today are kids and teenagers. They need to be able to identify with you. If you are 30 plus, that’s almost impossible. Add to this Kaiser’s eternal refusal to compromise on his music and you know why Dnepr is not a household name in the charts.

​Fast forward 23 years to the beginning of 2018. The world has not heard a lot from Dnepr, or Kaiser, since 1995, certainly not in the form of an album. What happened, Kaiser? Kaiser doesn’t want to talk about these years of near retirement, except in private mode. But then, slowly slowly, he crawled back to life and music and reactivated Nihilitz Studios. Songs of No Return is promoted as your comeback album, I mention to Kaiser, but actually you have already released The Nine Gates two years ago. I am happy that you make me talk about it, he replies, so for the first time I get to explain what is the story behind the nine gates.

The new Dnepr album is literature turned into music. Kaiser likes to read - long, difficult reads, mostly from dead authors - and he knows his books well. “Zettels Traum” is inspired by the monumental work of the same title by Arno Schmidt (my song is not a musical abstract of the book; it’s the soundtrack of a dream with breaks and surprising twists, Kaiser says); “Venaska” is a main character in Alfred Döblin’s utopian novel “Berge, Meere und Giganten”, polygamous and bisexual (the book is about contrasts. It’s a dystopia with a woman, a goddess of love, who is called Venaska. I tried to compose a song that is oscillating between the ugly and the beautiful). 
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Kaiser is a nerd for sound. At any time of the day he may feel inspired to go down to the basement, in his studio, and work on a track. All night long, if needed. Once he dreamt of a counterpart to a leitmotiv he had composed earlier. When he woke up, he immediately ran downstairs, naked as he was, strapped on his guitar and recorded the idea. Are you nerdy with guitars as well?, I ask Kaiser. I am not a collector, he says, I only own two guitars (two handmade Gordon Smith guitars, made in UK). In the end it’s the effect pedals and the amplifiers that create the sound. If I go to a concert and the guitarist hauls a rack with five guitars onto the stage, I know that I am in the wrong place.

Dnepr have never played a lot of concerts, not even in their primetime in the 1980ies and 1990ies. In 2018 Kaiser played one set in the knight’s hall of an old castle near Bern. This year, there were the album launch in September and another gig in November. And that’s it. I like to play loud, Kaiser explains, really loud. Preferably at 120 decibels. In most places that’s not possible. But I can’t trim down. Playing my music at 93 decibels? Even whistling is louder!

Already Kaiser has ideas for a next album. Is he recording? Not yet, he says. I am all about re-inventing myself. But when I start something new, I find my old music crappy. I am not yet ready to ditch Songs of No Return. That’s why I stick with it for the time being. 

I don’t even remember how I came up with the last question for Kaiser, but I must have been touched by something when listening to Dnepr’s albums: does he believe in love? Despite of his wary attitude towards society and his reluctance to comply with the masses, despite of all the utopian landscapes and the dystopian soundscapes that he creates: everything in Kaiser’s music is love. It’s a love that he gives and a love that he yearns to receive, forever carried and supported by the big waves of hope - hope for humankind, hope for a more human society - emanating from the strings of his guitar in Nihilitz Studios at Ulaanbaatar.
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It is because of love why we are on this planet, Kaiser answers. Without love we wouldn’t do anything, without love we wouldn’t make music. We would simply squat on the ground and pick our noses. 

Dnepr will perform at Les Amis/Wohnzimmer in Bern, Switzerland, on November 14, 2019. Be there (and have your earplugs handy)!

​Frida’s concert in Bern was a success beyond expectations. The audience was thirsting for her message of self-love and collective empowerment and for her well tempered dose of spirituality that many of us are lacking in our get-up-and-go lives. Visiting Bern has enabled Frida to meet musicians such as the exceptional accordionist Mario Batkovic and ECM recording artist and bassist Björn Meyer to talk about their approach to music and about possible future collaborations. Already Swiss rapper Greis joined Frida on two songs at Café Marta, subsequently inviting her to be his guest at his own concert later that week. Frida sang Ya Sadi’i (my friend) on this occasion and this song’s story “about the courage to chose the less traveled path to experience the magic unfold so we become the makers of our destinies”, is a story that speaks to all of us, regardless of our mastering the Arabic language or not. Frida’s message is an universal one. We need her to be the companion of our lives for many years to come.

Indeed: the oriental notes of "Sister Mercy" could indicate a future progression of the band. And also the noise elements that are present in several corners of "Devil Dance", especially in the last 30 seconds of "My Own Game”. Sure thing, the blues will always be the musical root of Velvet Two Stripes, but if we dive into the blues even more that we already did, the band says, "we can soon collaborate with Philipp Fankhauser."

Anyway, Velvet Two Stripes don’t see themselves as a blues band, but rather as a rock band. As a blues garage rock band that likes to play hard and loud. With "Devil Dance" they have created the essence of this style, they have found the state they desire. The songs of Velvet Two Stripes have become more straightforward, without background vocals, pop elements and drum computers. VTS achieve a maximum effect with a reduced-to-the-max attitude.

Where is the musical journey of Velvet Two Stripes heading to? What's next in their career? I'm getting a rudimentary graphic out of my pocket that I drew in preparation for this interview. It shows Velvet Two Stripes in search of their true sound - which they have now found with "Devil Dance" - and the possibility, starting from this reference point, to further develop the sound of the band.

The three women like the drawing. "On the new album,” says Sara, "we've become bolder and dare to try out new things. Take 'Lizard Queen’ as an example: I have been playing this rolling guitar part with the deep bass sounds for ages at our soundchecks. So far, Sophie and Franca always found that it was boring. But now the time was right and we tried to build a song around this part."
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“With Velvet Two Stripes there is an ongoing development happening from the inside,” Sara continues. "We find each other more and more."