On her forthcoming debut album, irgendetwas das du liebst [something that you love], the rapper from Innsbruck combines poetic verses with the jazz-influenced sounds of her live band. Spilif is FM4’s Soundpark Act of the month for October.
It’s been almost five years since Spilif appeared on Austrian hip-hop radar for the first time. Over a hypnotic piano and Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, the Innsbruck native skillfully delivered lines like “You’re confused ’cause you just fell in love with rap music“. The mature sounded so mature was the experience of years that she had already acquired – both battling other rappers and with a previous band with whom she had made the Protest Song Contest finals.
Falling in love
“Let’s Fall In Love” was her first collaboration with producer Rudi Montaire, who lived in Munich at the time but has since moved to Innsbruck and works with Spilif on a regular basis. After they met at a concert by his previous band, she sent him a pretty song by Ella Fitzgerald as inspiration. The same day, he sent her back a beat lifted from it – and the next day, the song was finished.
Their musical chemistry led to a first EP, Das Leben tarnt sich nur als Schnitzeljagd [“life only disguises itself as a scavenger hunt”] – a quotation from Spilif’s mother. Soon after, the world situation made even the short trip from Munich to Innsbruck impossible. This slowed the pace of their collaboration, since neither of them found digitally sending things back and forth particularly inspiring…though a handful of demos and finished songs from the period were released on Lost Tracks.
But Spilif and Rudi Montaire already knew where they were headed. Instead of samples, a band would provide the beats. This change moved the sound away from dusty, jazz-infused beats toward a cleaner, organic sound, with an ample portion of pop. Spilif blooms in this setting, even when – as on her debut LP, which drops on Friday – she talks about difficulties and challenges. Like the “demons that tortured me” on the title track, or a relationship where “the spark has disappeared”, on “Löwenzahn”. But on balance, the introspective lyrics mostly end with an optimistic shrug of the shoulders: it’s not the end of the world. Now and then, the band chimes in with backup vocals, an effect that will no doubt work well on stage. Hip-hop doesn’t always mesh comfortably with a live band, but in this case the combination has led to a noticeable step forward. On irgendwas das du liebst, it sounds like the dynamic arrangements and a little more melody were exactly the extra dimension that Spilif’s songs had been waiting for.
Stefan “Trisches” Trischler, translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger