We’ve been following him for a few months now, and his star is rising. When is music ‘real’; how can you tell when someone has found their voice? fiio is the first FM4 Soundpark Act in the new year.
He started listening to music on a red CD player. Two CDs: one by 50 Cent and one by AC/DC. An extreme crossover – 2000s hip-hop and a boy’s first rock’n’roll love. It started in his childhood bedroom and moved on later to the indie band, where he was a fan of Alex Turner and the Arctic Monkeys. And there are the similarities: like Alex, fiio’s sound and look and style are all of a piece, all equally important. Concept rock’n’roll, if you will.
fiio scored a minor hit with “Touri” in 2021, in the wake of cloud rap and neo-emo. A tourist in one’s own city, riding around the Ring on a double-decker bus: that was the sound of Vienna. Now everything is different, and so is fiio’s sound. The key word: ‘real’.
fiio carries his integrity around with him. He’s not much of a dancer, he confesses immediately, but it doesn’t matter: he prefers bars to clubs anyway. He used to have terrible stage fright, and it still hasn’t disappeared completely. His earlier music? “I made ‘Touri’, and then I never listened to it again. Not once.”
Making music means giving the world a melody, and – how could it be otherwise? – that melody is different now than it was three years ago. fiio had to find his voice, he says. That takes time, and often luck as well. Now he’s arrived; he’s writing the songs he wants to make, songs in which he recognizes himself. His album is called Wir werden nur, was wir schon sind. Seems fitting.
There was a time when he wanted to move to Berlin, but now he sings songs about people who do. “Your friends all want to go to Berlin / You therapize yourself with a screen“. His songs are about the things we see in ourselves. Characters all trying to justify themselves to one another, who never say what they’re really thinking – or, more important, what they really want. Makes sense. It was even in the president’s new year’s address: people should “speak with one another” more.
Songs are therapeutic; the way you feel comes out in them. You tell the world things you wouldn’t tell your best friends. “That’s the problem with people at the moment,” says fiio: they don’t talk to one another, don’t enter into an honest, emotional dialogue. And he’s not just pointing the finger – he has a hard time with it himself, and he’s trying to work on it.
Honesty is a likeable quality, and so is having plans for the future. On January 27th, fiio’s playing at the FM4 birthday party at the Ottakringer Brewery in Vienna. And beyond that, big plans: he’s already working on his next album; the concept is a New York art-school band. If you automatically think of The Strokes, you’re not wrong. “It’s an incredibly specific idea, and there’s a big risk that you’re just copying it. But there’s nothing like that in German, so we were like: we’re just going to do it.”
Just doing it: the most wonderful characteristic of classic rock’n’roll mythology. Just trying something out in order to get closer to the thing you really want to do, the thing you want to be. fiio is close. “Suddenly, I’m standing there, wearing cowboy boots and a leather jacket, with a bandanna in my belt buckle, and I’m like: this is it, this is me.”
Translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger