Carmen Yahchouchi is a very courageous person, no doubt. This young photographer from Lebanon is not afraid to take risks when she tries to tell the story that she wants us to know about. When it gets dangerous, Carmen Yahchouchi keeps going, embracing the rush of adrenaline that goes with it. She secretly entered the rooms of sleeping migrant workers when working on a project called Vulnerable Visits. For Beyond Sacrifice, she won the hearts of women who stayed single all of their lives - most of them against their desire. Carmem Yahchouchi shot intimate portraits of proud yet deeply sad women sitting in their bedrooms who were able to exactly analyze when and why their lives’ journeys had taken a turn onto a road they hadn’t planned to follow.

​Until this point in her career –we are at the end of the year 2016 - Carmen Yahchouchi mostly had taken photos of women and of persons either sleeping or in their bedrooms. Her photos often had two different angles: either her camera looked straight into the eye of the person that she photographed - as in her most famous photo, the intriguing Victoria from the My Mother’s Gun series - or her photos were stolen moments with a voyeuristic feel to it. Carmen Yahchouchi doesn’t deny this side of hers at all. “I love voyeurism!,” she says when I interview her in Beirut. “I always have. I took many photos of my entire family, and of my ex boyfriends too, being a voyeur. Often I caught them while they slept or in other intimate moments.”

When a voyeur and adrenaline junkie meets a narcissistic, attention seeking exhibitionist, things get interesting. When Carmen Yahchouchi meets Suleiman for the first time, she instantly feels that she comes across a somewhat dangerous and perverse man. King Soleil Man, as he likes to be called, had repeatedly posted naked photos of himself on Facebook, sometimes together with African women. Facebook shut down his page as soon as they became aware of it, however Suleiman kept reopening it, posting more photos. Originally Carmen Yahchouchi had looked for single men to complement the many women of Beyond Sacrifice. She soon learned that Suleiman, an 80+ senior from the coast of Lebanon, actually was married with children (although neither his wife nor his children talked to him anymore). “I will tell you everything,” he said to Carmen, “I have nothing to hide.” Suleiman didn’t qualify for the project, Carmen Yahchouchi knew that, but he fit the crispy, out of the box profiles that she likes to get involved with. The exhibitionist had shown his potential and the voyeur had taken the bait. ​

Quickly the situation at Suleiman's home deteriorates. Sandrine is arrested in a night club without her residency papers on her and must quit Lebanon on short notice. She leaves Rosy behind, alone with Suleiman. Rosy has a different character than Sandrine: she is calm, shy and very religious. Suleiman had picked her up from the street a few months earlier where she had stranded because of problems with her former employer.​

And then one day, Carmen receives photos from Suleiman on her WhatsApp, photos that Suleiman had taken, showing him having sex with Rosy.

Rosy finds out that Suleiman had sent pictures of her making love with her employer to Carmen. She yells at Carmen. She is outraged. Rosy suspects a plot of some sorts where Suleiman and Carmen had conspired against her. The dynamics of a destructive triangle begin to work: Rosy is very angry with Suleiman because he had sent the photos to Carmen and she is very unhappy with Carmen having "accepted" these pictures. Rosy starts to get bossy with Suleiman. He in turn is not happy with Rosy making such a fuss about the pictures. Suleiman's relationship with Carmen starts to go frosty too. Whereas Suleiman was very open in the beginning, allowing Carmen to take very intimate photos of himself, he now backs up, “starts to go crazy on me” (as Carmen tells me), insults her and even tries to break her camera. Did Suleiman already regret to have agreed to this project? Had Carmen entered his life and his mind more than he was comfortable with? ​

​​Does this photo project say more about Carmen Yahchouchi than about her subject, King Soleil Man? What is her motivation to keep visiting Suleiman when he clearly becomes threatening to her? Suleiman sends her WhatsApp messages and writes that he wants to make love with her. One day, while she is with him, he shows her how he googles for “sex Carmen” on the internet. I must be strong now and not show any sign of weakness, Carmen says to herself, when on another day Suleiman starts to caress her neck while sitting next to her on the sofa. “What was this obsession that you had with King Soleil Man, Carmen?,” I ask her when I talk with her in Beirut. “Well, as you know,” she replies, “I like the dangerous and the adrenaline. But with Suleiman it went further. I was not able to get a hold of him. With the women that I had photographed for previous projects, it was easy for me to enter into their hearts. Now with a man… I went mad. I kept telling myself that I must finish what I had started.”

 
Carmen Yahchouchi’s photos of the self appointed King Soleil Man also teach us another important lesson: the more we see the less we know. It is not by watching pornography that we learn about the joy of sexual love. It is not by booking a “see all” holiday package to China that we will know more about the inner workings of a society governed by an authoritarian regime. It is not by following Kendall or Kylie Jenner’s Instagram feed that we understand the true personalities of these model-entrepreneurs. 

Suleiman showing off his erection shouldn’t make us look past his many personal conflicts, his weaknesses, his anxieties. What we see is what he wants us to see. The message he tries to convey is the mirror he would like to see himself in. When Suleiman says “I will show you all I have”, he actually means “I will hide everything”. The last photo of the series shows Suleiman sitting on his bed, all dressed up in winter clothes, confused and lost. His encounter with Carmen Yahchouchi and her camera had made him drop his shield, his facade had disintegrated and his soul was laid bare. Within a few weeks he had gone from close-ups to closed-up. For a long time Suleiman had clung to a distorted image of himself. We all do when it seems to serve us. Because it is too painful to try real intimacy for a change and to finally start healing our emotional injuries. 

For an even deeper dive into the world of King Soleil Man, here is a selection of additional photos taken by Carmen Yahchouchi. 

As we all know there are two types of Americans (like everything in America exists twice, once in a bearable, once in an unbearable way): on the one hand we have the cacophonous Americans, represented by Donald Trump. On the other hand we have the introspective Americans. Julia Holter, the avant-garde pop musician from Los Angeles, belongs to the second group. She herself suffers a great deal from the cacophony of some Americans. When she does she often goes back to her studio for a cathartic recording session. 

Originally cathartic meant to purge the body of unwanted material. Nowadays the expression is also used to describe emotional release and spiritual cleansing. I meet Julia Holter for an interview one hour before her concert in Zurich to present “Aviary”, her most recent album. “When talking about your new album, you often use the word cathartic. What is the unwanted material you want yourself to purge from?,” I ask her. ​

“I don’t really know,” Julia Holter says. “For this record I was recording myself improvising and then I created my new songs starting from these improvisations. And while improvising, I felt ecstatic, sort of hypnotic and in the moment. It felt therapeutic in a way. But therapeutic is the wrong word too because it was more intense than that. It kind of put me in a space of something. In a space for me to be in.”

As Julia Holter has said herself in a previous interview: she finds it hard to be articulate sometimes. She actually finds it hard to communicate sometimes. Julia Holter is a rather shy person, a bit nervous when talking to strangers and despite her success with critics and the audience alike, she is not always quite sure about herself. When interviewing Julia Holter one doesn’t get prefabricated replies. She is a seeker who probes, considers and weighs every statement before it is formulated. For a humble, no-show-off-person like Julia Holter, “I don’t know” is a possible answer too.

Julia Holter’s albums are a daring and unique mix of experimental sounds and familiar melodies based on her profound understanding of the history of music, be it pop or jazz. On “Have You In My Wilderness”, her record of 2015, Julia Holter uses strings that feel like a slow camera drive in a documentary film on the history channel, showing objects that in their primetime meant something to somebody but don’t belong to anybody anymore today. Last year’s “Aviary” is full of instrumental parts where the listener is left alone with his or her thoughts. What is it exactly that fascinates me when listening to Julia Holter? It is the yearning that she conveys. The yearning for a beautiful dream.

​How does Julia Holter perform her music live? Surprisingly very close to the versions recorded in the studio. Her band (consisting of percussions, a stand-up double bass, synthesizers and keyboards, plus a violin and a trumpet) is able to recreate and provide the chamber pop experience the audience came for. The muted trumpet played by Sarah Belle Reid is masterful, particularly in a duet with Julia Holter singing and playing keyboards on “Voce Simul”. Julia Holter and her instrument are positioned closed to the edge of the stage; she mostly has her eyes turned towards the ceiling, fixing a point somewhere in the middle of the room. The stage is dimly lit and when the spotlights are on, they are rather directed towards the band than towards her. In between her trips to a musical fantasyland one can even tap his foot and dance to Julia Holter’s music.
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​“You are asking a lot from your listeners. How do you find your audience with music that sounds complex and is not easily consumed?,” I ask Julia Holter during the interview.

“I don’t know how complex my music is,” she replies. “I am not like ‘I want this record to be complicated’. A lot of people I know who don’t make ‘commercial music’ are not thinking about the audience when they are composing, to be honest. In the end it’s really doing what you want to do and that is all you can do actually. It’s not that my music is not for an audience, it’s just not for a specific audience."

“Could you write a number one chart hit?”

​Julia Holter is slightly surprised when hearing my question. “Chart hit? I don’t know,” she says. “It doesn’t occur to me to do that. I am told that people writing for the charts strategize and I am not strategizing at all what I do. It’d be cool to have a chart hit though, I am not against it.”

​In that sense Julia Holter is a very playful character. She is having fun with what she is doing so skillfully: creating sounds and making music. Almost out of the blue she can produce lines like “I si I tho I sex I jeu I nice I hey I ay I show I fun I tall” (in “Les jeux to you”) to have us bathe in the sounds of these words. Is she aware of the impact her records and her concerts have on her audience? Fully realizing how much her art resonates with many people around the world - and integrating this awareness - should in itself fuel Julia Holter’s obvious quest to own her power. We may not have heard anything from Julia Shammas Holter yet.
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​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.

The next day, when we meet again, Sandra is in a good mood, offering Belgian chocolate to everybody. Sam lies on the bed and fingers around on his electric guitar before he goes into a catchy rock tune from his own Uncle Sam band in Beirut. In the meantime Katja is busy doing some household work, watering plants and hanging laundry. Katja was born in Germany but lives in London since 1998, working as a freelance powerpoint guru and an organizer of art events. It is thanks to her that Sandmoon play three concerts in London.​

Katja sits down at her piano, jammed between the bed and the wall, and plays Bach. Sam plays along on the guitar, still on the bed, his eyes staring at the ceiling. Me improvising on Bach, Sam says afterwards, what the hell!

Saturday night’s venue is the Hornbeam Café, an organic, authentic neighborhood café and also a community center. The Hornbeam is a place similar to the Onomatopoeia in Beirut where Sandmoon like to play. What is Sandra for you?, I ask Sam outside the café, just before the show. Sandra is like a mother to me, Sam says. She is a great teacher; it’s three years now that I am playing with her. She makes me control myself better, musically and also in general. I am still relatively young, Sam explains, and therefore I have a tendency for wanting to storm the sky.​

Even without the full band, Sandmoon cover a lot of musical ground with their performance this evening. Sandra clearly has made the transition from recording artist to performing artist. She is at ease on stage, displays a lot of self confidence and is closer to the audience than I had ever seen her.

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."

MONO is an instrumental band but on their website (one of the richtest and most informative I've ever seen of a band), they are very eloquent with words. Here Taka describes the idea behind “Transcendental” in words that would suit a church chaplain. The track is about life and death and regeneration, Taka explains. When our bodies decay and decompose in death, and thus become the seeds for future generations, our souls will journey together into our new eternal life.

“Where does your spirituality come from”, I ask Taka.

“I don’t trust what I see. There are things that we only can feel.

The new album from MONO is called "Nowhere Now Here" and for Taka it feels like a second debut album. Two years ago MONO had huge problems with their management and at the same time the drummer left the band. The future of the band was seriously threatened; MONO was like a tired creature, Taka says: "No drummer, no management, no money." This dark period is also the reason why on the new album for the first time in the career of MONO there is singing. "One day Tamaki, our bassist, called me and told me I can’t breathe anymore, there are too many stories going around. And I told her, everything will be fine, trust me. The band will live on and we will also find a new drummer.” Finally, Taka wrote the song" Breathe”, based on the idea that Tamaki cannot breathe. And now she sings this song on stage!