The Paradisco principle

They are clever wise guys indeed, Lea Heimann and Katharina Reidy. They name their band Paradisco and someone like me sees Italian gelati in front of him and thinks, okay, now that's a nice play on words with Paradiso and Disco. But when you prepare to interview the two women, a synapse suddenly snaps in your brain: watch out! Wasn’t there something with Para? This is not quite as innocent as it sounded at first, just think of paramilitary and parasites. And paranoia.

The story of Paradisco is quickly told: Lea has always played music, Katharina never did. The two friends went to concerts together a lot. And then, in 2015, Lea was tired of her saxophone - she was now more interested in electronica, in sounds and in noises - and almost at the same time Katharina grabbed the app of her musician friend and produced beats and loops with it herself. Three months later they were on stage for the first time at Fri-Son in Fribourg, Switzerland, as Paradisco.

With their music, Paradisco want to merge the digital and the analog into a fusion. "We are looking for tones, for sound structures that together form a sphere," says Lea. "We want to provoke a digital-analog approach in which the listener no longer realizes which is one and what is the other."

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.”​

"That's precisely Paradisco. A smooth surface, but it's got philosophy underneath!"

"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!"
​

Breaking out, leaving norms and guilt behind, that's what we all struggle with in life, not just Paradisco. Later in the song the lyrics go: "It's time to get away, but I can't". Meanwhile, Paradisco are singing “… and I can” on stage. What led to this change of perspective, I ask Lea later via WhatsApp. "The first times we played this song on stage, I noticed that my view of things had changed for me," she replies. “Life had strengthened me in the meantime and I realized that I definitely have a choice and also the strength to change things. This victimization - but I can’t - didn't suit me anymore. ”

In the video for “Two Old Stones” it is actor Andri Schenardi who tries to act as a breakaway. He sits at home being bored - prophetic as Paradisco are, they produced the video even before the current Corona lockdown - and does more and more bizarre things, also with the selfie stick, to keep himself busy. A video entirely in the sense of a critique of today's world, in which self-presentation is the preferred means of communication and sexual fantasies and experimental fetishism have to be lived out alone due to circumstances. But then again: You don't want to be made of plastic and you don’t want to be made of stone, and you even dance with a broken neck, as Paradisco sing in their song "Fantaplast".​

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.