The FM4 Soundpark is a web-platform, community, and radio show for Austrian musicians. Every month, one act is selected to be highlighted both online and on air: The FM4 Soundpark Act of the Month. Understatement and guitar: two good things to make music with. Clemens Bäre aka doppelfinger is the FM4 Soundpark Act for March.
Do you also have that one person in your Whatsapp feed who likes to do two things to torture you: on the one hand, there’s the continuous use of capital letters, followed by the arbitrarily placed, almost continuous flood of question marks and call signs (hands up, if your pulse doesn’t quicken at the sight of: “!?!?!?!”)? You still like this person a bit, but you also feel that they rob you of more energy than is necessary. These over-packed chat histories are reminiscent of everything that jumps at us each day in the big, wide web in terms of information, advertising or even music playlists.
It would be nice if someone – regardless of whether they are successful or not – would shout a little quieter into the Internet. Musician Clemens Bäre, who now lives in Vienna, releases his songs as doppelfinger, and he does so in a refreshingly unagitated manner.
Let’s stick with quiet restraint and what could also be called “contemplation” without all the religious appendages. These are a few of the things that constitute the vibe when Clemens Bäre sits across from you – a young (mid-20s), almost slightly shy musician who never forgets to laugh at himself.
In 2020, Clemens Bäre released his first single as doppelfinger, called “trouble”. He grew up first in Lower- then in Upper Austria. The first songs are, according to tradition, first and foremost, private bedtime lullabies. After his training with the instrument the recorder – which was as compulsory as it was tedious – Clemens played the trombone, but then, in his early teens, discovered the guitar. Music was always a topic at home, but with no connection to the pressure to perform. “When I look at old family photos, I’m sure you can see my dad on every second one, at some party or other, where he’s unpacked his guitar again and played and sang along to it – whether the others wanted him to or not!” laughs Clemens. Then, the naturally wrong epiphany dawns: “Oh God, I hope I’m not my dad!”.
At the same time, it seems he’s a great dad. He loves long car rides and Bruce Springsteen, and even though Clemens has now outgrown the Boss phase, he still likes to return to the hits sometimes. Together with his good friend, musician OSKA, he covers songs by Father John Misty as well as “I’m On Fire”.
“Now I’ll just keep trying on my own” Clemens thus sings on “trouble,” the aforementioned first song, which won’t appear until he’s already living in Vienna. “It was a bit of the thought of: There’s nothing to lose anyway, if I just put something out”. On the contrary – in the meantime, Clemens Bäre has signed with Ink Music and is supported by a close circle of music friends. Jakob Herber from the band FLUT, who also produces for ANGER, advised him on the release of his first single. The graphic design as well as his press photos were created by Sophie Löw (CULK, Sophia Blenda), mixed by Sophie Lindinger (Leyya, My Ugly Clementine). And also on board: Lukas Lauermann and his cello.
“Sometimes a song works according to the most basic structure – very simple with just guitar and voice. I think it’s so exciting to write a song in a very stripped down way, have a demo and then ask: What else does the song need? Because it usually tells you what it wants and what it doesn’t anyway.”
The loving approach to art. For Clemens Bäre, a song is more than the musician; an album more than the sum of its parts. He almost has to smile again as he did with Springsteen and Papa when he admits: “It’s a typical thing in folk music to tell stories. Dylan experienced something and then wrote a song about it. I didn’t do that, at least with this album. I hope – I think! – it’s OK if the debut album is even more about the person who wrote it.” Wide-eyed, he quickly adds, “It was important for me to really gruesomely self-examine with this album, to critique myself, to record how negative I often am about myself – and about everything in general.” An album about ego, that isn’t that at all. How is that? Refreshing. Or, as Clemens Bäre sings on the song “how to hide”: “I feel bad about every line I write.”
Clemens Bäre writes minimally arranged songs that should please all those who otherwise like to listen to Oskar Haag, Adrienne Lenker and all her excellent projects or the calmer strings of Phoebe Bridgers. He himself adds good names like Aldous Harding or – of course – Bob Dylan as not necessarily role models, but great sources of inspiration. In other words, all musicians who, in addition to suffering, love and the un-romanticism of everyday life, also devote themselves to the abysses of their soul’s landscape. “Even if these are sad songs, it’s important that the emotion doesn’t make it heavy, doesn’t crush it,” says Clemens Bäre about his first album, which will be released on March 18 and is titled “by design”.
“exposure” is the name of the instrumental opening number, and then we are given the opportunity to dive into the mind of someone who judges himself most harshly. Why, you sometimes want to ask him, when you hear light-footed wonderful songs like “quite alright”, or the enchanted “seasonal affective disorder”. But that’s what makes this project, doppelfinger, unique and out-there – the unobtrusiveness, the honesty, the refreshing modesty.
And on top of that, even a little bit of humor. The album closes with the words “oh I’ve learned / how to hide”, which makes the aforementioned disclosure a bit null and void again. A good album is a physical product and unconditional goal of a young music career, a cosmos that is self-contained. It’s like a good book: the details are hidden for those who want to go in search of them.
At the end of our conversation I ask Clemens Bäre why he writes his artist name, doppelfinger, as well as all song titles without a capital letter. Of course, this is not just a formal, lovely gimmick or even hip. This is music for people who are sick of them – the capitals and the exclamation marks.
Lisa Schneider
Translated from the German original from March 1st, 2022 by Arianna Alfreds.