FM4 Soundpark is a web platform, community, and radio show for and with Austrian musicians. In an ongoing collaboration, FM4’s team recommends particular artists of the moment to amplify. Today, the honor goes to: Beaks – who is on FM4 and at Paris Fashion Week. It’s time to finally get to know her better!
Pleased to meet you, Beaks
In this new FM4 Soundpark series, we introduce you to the homegrown acts that everyone will be talking about the day after tomorrow.
The best place to be at a Beaks concert is in one of the first rows. It’s not music for huge halls or stadiums, it’s music where, at best, you’re already hanging on the lips of the person singing, or … talking!
We’ll talk about talking a lot about talking here (rather than singing) because Anna (her off-stage name) not only always thought that she was totally unmusical, but also that she couldn’t really sing. Life lessons always prefer to learn from and accept those who tell you how it really was and don’t sugarcoat things afterwards. It was like this: everyone around her was making music somehow, and Anna had been writing as well as ever, and then at some point there was a nudge from these good friends, many of whom she has. A nudge in the direction of “just do it”, and that’s exactly what she did. So now she’s a role model for all those who don’t dare or, above all, don’t trust themselves to do it. Making music may be a gift, but above all there is always dedication and simply work behind it.
Keyword role model: As Beaks, Anna is on stage, and as Anna she walks the runways of the world. She was just recently in Paris for Fashion Week, where she went to the casting, as she often does, and was then rung out of bed early in the morning because it worked. It’s not her first experience in the fashion world, because while we’re chatting about trends and non-trends, she talks about this one time when she opened a Celine show. The song that she has associated with fashion and everything that goes with it ever since is “Calling it” by Automatic.
In this case, we can safely throw around the worn-out word “multi-talented”, because talking to Beaks about music is at least as good as discussing the latest Ugg boots with her, as well as the books she is currently reading. In her case, it’s true: many people who write a lot also read a lot. She recommends Sylvia Plath (or not, if the current mindset is leaning more towards depression), she recommends Jack Kerouac and the entire Beat generation in general, she has currently decided to dig through their books and especially the books of female authors who have written in their wake. Because, of course, they are not talked about as much as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and co.
Equally, she is a big fan of Patti Smith and recently went to see her at the Open Air Arena in Vienna and enjoys reading “M Train” or “Just Kids” – a book that should be on every bookshelf anyway. What Patti Smith does is tell stories from her life in a language that is very close to reality, but then weaves things into her stories where it is not quite clear whether they are true or not. Beaks titled one of her songs “The unreliable narrator”, and it reflects this approach. Beaks also tells stories in her songs that always dance a little on the threshold of what is true and what is not quite so true.
Beaks sent us her first song “I dropped the bottle” a good year and a half ago, and since then no one has come along who sounds like her. This is music for people who usually like to load their playlists with music by King Krule, Dry Cleaning or maybe even Preoccupations. And that has everything to do with the aforementioned intonation and narrative style, but above all, it has to do with the fact that this is music that, at best, is played in the American countryside in a slightly run-down pub, or in the UK, in a hip city and a cool underground club of your choice. In the end, it’s rock’n’roll.
The scene in Austria, and therefore also in Vienna, is well connected and that’s also the case with Anna and her own music-making. She likes to hang out at Villa Lala, where people like Bibiza, Filly and Filous come and go. A few weeks ago, she played support for SALÒ in the sold-out Vienna Arena – that was the kind of concert where it’s best to stand in the fifth or sixth row. She is currently slowly gaining live experience, sometimes with a full band (Sofie Royer!), such as recently at the Vienna Popfest, or just the two of them. Beaks played her very first gig in Tokyo, in a club on the sixth floor. It was like a fever dream, she laughs, and even then she could hardly say whether it actually happened.
Lisa Schneider
Translated from the German original by Arianna Alfreds.