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 July, the honor goes to the mild-mannered R&B/pop rapper Apollo Sissi.
It’s always a good sign when you’re tempted to show off with the fact that you know certain people – at least, it says a lot about your esteem for them. In Apollo Sissi’s case, it would sound like this: “Have you heard of him? He’s really likeable, super friendly, and he reads Stefan Zweig.” Or that’s the way it would have gone two years ago, before his first FM4 interview – a gentle interview, gently conducted, because that’s what he is: a gentle person. Now, on the occasion of his second FM4 interview, you could easily tack on a couple more big literary names (and we will), but actually this article is about something else – the music! In any case: Apollo Sissi is our FM4 Soundpark Act for July.
“I had ‘rock star’ tattooed on my stomach for my dream,” Sissi rap-sings on “hasse alles (ausser dich)” [“hate everything (except you)”]. The rest of his body decoration just kind of happened, and we all know that you don’t ask about tattoo stories. The belly dream, in any case, seems to be gaining momentum: Apollo Sissi counts Mavi Phoenix, Bilderbuch, and Alex the Flipper among his labelmates. Clearly, someone’s got big plans for him. Before he worked out his doubly attractive pseudonym (“my music deals a lot with beauty”), Apollo Sissi had already performed and released music under another name – Linz is the perfect city for it, he says. “It’s so cool there; as soon as as anyone does something, everybody knows about it.” Apollo Sissi’s first show there was packed.
Linz is home to both the hip-hop producer Flip and to Flipper (as in ‘Alex the’). With the latter, Apollo Sissi shares a killer instinct for timing and atmosphere – and, of course, for the beat that goes best with heartbreak. Another good name-drop is Wenzel Beck – their musical bond is so close that they’ve worked out songs together in an elevator. Apollo Sissi always has his notebook with him; he writes every day. Paper is great, he says, because “you can doodle a little bit in the margins.” Pause. “Which is cool.”
“You have to know what kind of calm you need.”
Apollo Sissi lives in Vienna now, but he’ll probably be moving on soon. Aside from his very cool (you could even say ‘urban’) Insta feed, he’s a guy who likes to keep his distance. Either you want everything from life or you don’t – but then he says things like ‘breathing exercises’, ‘yoga’, ‘medititation’, pauses for a moment to think before continuing carefully: “You have to know what kind of calm you need.” His new EP (at eight tracks, you could easily call it an album) is called the most beautiful storm you can imagine – he also wins the prize for one of the best titles in recent weeks. And who or what is this exactly, this storm of the century? “Life!” Sigh.
Maybe the music and all of it is so interesting because goes so completely against the idea of the spotlight. Maybe also because a young person is able to mark out his goals and his limits so clearly, or because he’s so aware of what’s good for him. Are his parents strict? They were at his performance at the Lido Sounds Festival for the first time – and along with everyone else, they heard a lot of unsubtle lines about sex, drugs, and various other forms of intoxication. “They just trust me,” says Sissi, riding roughshod over decades of child-rearing wisdom.
People who are free of societal (and in this case transgenerational) pressures and neuroses probably write the best songs. Ditto people who allow the characters in their songs to act for themselves instead of characterizing them to death. In his music, life is exactly what it is: a continuing daisy-plucking game. He loves her, he loves her not.
If Apollo Sissi is looking for a new line for his Insta bio, we strongly recommend the one in big letters at the top of this article: “I’m in love again.” It’s appropriate for him, for the EP, and generally for his view of life. It seems like he’s always talking about the dawn of love, love’s end, love undiscovered…and thus: about being young regardless of one’s age. Apollo Sissi has an eye for small things that become large in his gaze, and in the communication of all these situations (“there’s actually nothing I wouldn’t write about”) he takes the sting out of individual loneliness. Which does make it sort of a “we’re-all-in-this-together” music.
“How can you say you’ve tried your best at life if you won’t even dance?” someone asks someone else in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf – another writer to whom Apollo Sissi returns again and again. And therein lies the truth of Apollo Sissi: holding back isn’t his thing – in conversation, perhaps, but otherwise not. And in music definitely not. It’s what defines him.
Translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger