FM4 Soundpark is a web platform, community, and radio show for and with Austrian musicians. Each month, one act is selected to be featured on air and online. In June the honor goes to the young (punk) rocker Anda Morts.
“Nice. Or at least, not an asshole,” says Anda Morts when we ask him how he imagines one of his fans. But not before he sighs, looks confused, considers the question. Clearly, he’s never thought about it before. The fact that everything gets a little smoother with a record contract and the current trendiness of his chosen genre – a mixture of punk and Neue Deutsche Welle – is irrelevant.
“I wanted to look like an 80s punk.”
Still, as Andreas Schneider (his real name) sits in the FM4 studio, you can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else there. This isn’t a guy who always wanted to be on stage. He’s not a born entertainer, not a person who worries too much – or in fact cares at all – about what people think of him. That’s probably because he’s already seen some things in his life, although he’s just reached his “quarter-life crisis”. Also because living on the streets of Linz as a punk no doubt teaches you a few things. That’s not the weekend going-to-the-club kind of punk, but the real kind. As a teenager, Anda cut himself a Mohawk, grabbed a sleeping bag (or didn’t) and headed out, to sleep rough and see what the next day would bring. “I wanted to look like an 80s punk,” he says, and adds, “and I guess I did.”
No, you’ve grown up well / you don’t look like those punks anymore, Anda sings on “Adidas für Mama” a perfect song for anyone who was ever 14 and looking for ways to rebel. Anda Morts writes plain songs and plainspoken lyrics. It remains to be seen how worn-out they get after being played a hundred times…but insert your favorite quote here about the simplest things being the best things, etc. etc.
Does he feel like he slips into a role when he goes onstage? That’s the next question for Anda, who (as we already mentioned) is still getting used to the role of frontman and interviewee. But then he says something really good: “I like music better when I can hear who’s making it. I’m not into artists who ‘perform’ something – I find self-expression more interesting.”
Between Punk and Neue Deutsche Welle
Anda Morts’s first EP, titled simply “Morts”, came out on June 2nd. The return of manginess, Birkenstocks with socks, streaky blond hair and homemade tattoos (or those with a similar aesthetic). Anda Morts likes cold beer, a good play on words, and definitely doesn’t do yoga. Visually, he fits in between bands like the Viagra Boys and IDLES pretty well, but clearly, the Neue Deutsche Welle currently breaking over domestic pop (again) has carried Anda Morts along with it.
We conduct the interview in good old Linzer slang, but interestingly, words like ‘kucken’ and ‘wütend’ (instead of ‘grantig’) creep into his lyrics now and again. That’s maybe the only slightly disappointing thing about Anda Morts’ first songs – after all, he knows how well dialect and punk go together.
The ur-punk: if you grew up in Linz and liked listening to three to five notes, you know Attwenger. “My dad always had two Attwenger CDs in his car, and I’ve still got them.” In his video for the song “Leere Flaschen”, he wears a t-shirt advertising the provincial punk-rockers. His request for the Soundpark edition is Georg Danzer’s “War das etwa Haschisch” [“Could That Have Been Hashish”].
Anda’s German-German word choice might also be influenced by his other band, Die Partie. He’s been writing for a long time (always on paper, “otherwise I can’t cross anything out!”) – a likeable trait. But up until about three years ago, his lyrics were all in English. If Anda Morts is punk, Die Partie is good-natured indie-rock, more discriminating in their combination of guitars, distortion, and lyrics about excessive alcohol consumption and nihilism. On the whole, though, Anda Morts is one of them – perhaps not at first glance, but there’s no denying that he’s the latest of a gentle wave of rock musicians with scratchy voices and a devil-may-care attitude.
The banality of existence
And he writes songs about the day after, about depressive Sundays…or Mondays, or Wednesdays – in other words, the already-present, possibly wrecked future. There are intoxicants other than alcohol. Anyone who has ever felt that peculiar detachment from themselves after a beautiful, important, but intense experience knows the feeling. Homecoming from vacation, from the tour, from the festival, only to find that the everyday world continued to turn while you were gone. Do laundry, buy milk, clean the house. Everything covered in dust, nothing matters. Back in the day it would have been chalked up to the artist/citizen conflict.
The issues on Anda Morts’ first EP are insightful enough to no longer fit in the head-in-the-clouds adolescent phase, but not yet so jaded that there’s no room left for more thoughtfulness. “We need this in Hamburg,” they write in the comments on Instagram and YouTube. Anda’s on his way, and it’s going to be good.