As previously mentioned, one of the things that came about after Dusted mainstay Jennifer Kelly's cancer diagnosis was a Bandcamp compilation in her honour. Per Jenny's wishes it is free to listen and download to; details (and links to most of the contributors) are all over on the Bandcamp page. Thanks to everyone who contributed (including several Dusted comrades), and everyone who listens.
(There was also an amazing benefit concert for Jenny recently, you can see some pictures on the Dusted Instagram, for example here.)
IMustBe Leonardo works in charcoal sketches, blocking out melancholy atmospherics in acoustic or fuzzy electric guitar and warbling evocative, occasionally puzzling scraps of poetry in a tender voice slightly warped by German consonants (i.e.“the” is “duh” and w’s become v’s).
Songs like “Project for an Airport Chair” are only slightly foreign, but feel like they’ve arrived from an alternate universe, as the artist describes his craft in a liminal space, jotting down ideas in an airport “Different chair and paper, but the writing is still mine,” he warbles, getting at both the transitional nature of travel and, at the same time, the human condition as we move from one point in time to another, changed but still ourselves. The song is brief and elliptical, but it manages to cover all this anyway, and even hint at the mysteries that surround death. “I’ll be fine and blank here,” he confides, “There’s no need to write goodbye.” It’s all been sparse and minimal to this point, but then, as he sometimes does, Leonardo kicks things up into a noisier gear, ending the song in the hum and distortion of electric guitar.
Dusted first caught onto IMustBe Leonardo in 2024, when his Not to be Scared of Weekend hurtled over the transom and landed in my “now playing” list, where it was much admired. Last March, I wrote, “This is a wonderful album, absolutely original and striking and unpremeditated.” Leonardo wrote us a Listed soon after, which is definitely worth a look. The list includes Vic Chestnutt, worthy on his own terms, but also relevant to this album, because two-time Chestnutt producer Howard Bilerman also recorded Berlin, Ohio.
But really, this is Leonardo’s show, and songs like “My Favorite Knife” hit home because of how idiosyncratic and personal they are. The song starts quietly with the narrator turning the kitchen implement over in his hands, contemplating friendship and isolation in concrete but elusive terms. “My favorite knife, it comes from the past, it tells me the story of 88 friends,” Leonardo begins, evoking a happy, communal past. But even the knife knows that this is not the current reality, Leonardo implies, “It says how come you only chop garlic for yourself?”
In his notes, Leonardo says that he was influenced by the influx of Ukrainian refugees into Berlin as he wrote these songs, and indeed, dislocation and alienation run through much of the material. This is not a happy album, but it’s a lovely one, whether blaring distorted guitar rock, as at the end of “My Favorite Knife” or winding dream-haunted vocals through shoegazey “Perhaps.” “Your Last Words to Me” ends with a repeated chorus of “I just want to sleep all the time,” and sure, of course, who doesn’t? But it’s reassuring that artists like Leonardo continue to wrestle with our dystopian times and try to find bits of beauty in them.
IMustBe Leonardo is a Berlin-based songwriter who has been making his oddball songs since around 2016. His latest album, Not To Be Scared of Weekend, is a self-recorded delight, entirely unfettered by commercial considerations — with one song that asks the eternal question, “Why should...you need god…when you have Kim Gordon?” Writing about it, Jennifer Kelly said, “About half the tracks are hand-made rock songs, bolstered by clicky drum tracks and ravaged guitar tones. The other half are the maddest, most surreal campfire songs you ever heard, gently strummed but extremely odd.” Leonardo wrote us one of the nicest — and longest — thank you notes we’ve ever received at Dusted, so of course we asked him for a Listed.
Nina Simone — An Artist's Duty
What she says in these 51 seconds, the way she asks that question at the end — everything is there.
Typhoon — Sympathetic Magic
This album was released in January 2021. Kyle Morton is a poet and a great songwriter. His notes to the album tell all you need to know: “The songs are about people — the space between them and the ordinary, miraculous things that happen there, as we come into contact, imitate each other, leave our marks, lose touch. Being self and other somehow amounting to the same thing.” He played a solo gig in Berlin, on June 17, 2023. I asked him to play my favorite song, “And So What If You Were Right.” He did it. He said it was the first time he played it in public. That was a gift.
Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha — Ballad Of A White Cow
There is almost only love in this movie, and all that love leads only to suffering. It terrifies me to see how often “doing the right thing” and well-intended lies destroy good people’s lives.
Emma Ruth Rundle — Engine of Hell
This album is a pulsing heart in the shape of a songwriter sitting in front of us, playing piano or classical guitar, and singing her story. “I wanted to be close to the listener and be whispering to you. I wanted to be close on an emotional level. Because I wanted to connect with myself on an emotional level, ” she said about this record. It takes courage to do this. It also takes a little bit of courage to stay in front of her and look at her fragile, invincible grace. Sonny Diperri, who recorded and produced this terrific record, is a great sound engineer and a lucky guy.
Christian Petzold — Undine
Art is proof that people can find infinite ways to create beauty, as long as they believe they truly need to love. Undine is a work of art. It not only is a truly original, touching movie about love. It is an act of love, made by people who can’t stand living in a society willing to humiliate and lose it.
Vic Chesnutt — At The Cut
Maybe one day our species will ignore what anguish is, and we will not even be allowed to mention the word. Someone will consider this “progress.” I don't see any progress in not feeling moved by what Vic Chesnutt — and every person involved in those sessions — did in this album.
Aki Kaurismaki — Ariel
I love Kaurismaki's cinema. I’m mentioning Ariel here just because it is probably my favorite... today. (For the record, it contains the best bank robbery scene in the film history.) If I ask myself why I love his movies so much, one reason I can put into words is that all his characters are condemned to the tragic and funny punishment of knowing what truly makes human beings happy. They are such stuff as the Tramp is made on.
This Mortal Coil — Blood
I put this album in my CD player recently, after several years, and started listening to it with the state of mind of someone who’s going to meet an ex-lover and is scared of not feeling anything.
I was wrong. It still asks me the same beautiful question: “Did you really think you knew which kind of songs you like?”
Hirokazu Kore-eda — Shoplifters
I see Kore-eda as a sort of photo reporter who goes around and, almost by mistake, takes poetic pictures of fragments of happiness that — tomorrow — will not be there anymore. Laws were supposed to be instruments by which people pursued well-being. This movie shows how society rules are sometimes not ready to handle real life. They can end up killing what they should preserve, and it looks like a frighteningly stupid scenario.
New Pollution — Kiss The System
New Pollution is not just a band — it’s a no-filter attitude. They're the most contemporary group I know. I cannot imagine someone attending a New Pollution gig and not getting captured. There is spontaneity and freedom in everything they do — on stage and online. They keep releasing whatever they record (concerts, demos, soundtracks, studio sessions) and mocking all the show business rules. Nowadays musicians — indie ones more than others — are like bank clerks, each one with their daily plans: x hours of social media, x hours emails to labels, x hours emails to magazines... Music seems to be the last thing you should care about — and you're supposed to be a musician! New Pollution they don't care. “Revolution was your spare time,” they sing. I think Patrick Jessop has an instinctive awareness of how ephemeral existence is and I hope he never loses it.
IMustBe Leonardo — Not To Be Scared of Weekend (Self-Release)
“Why should you need gods when you have John Peel or PJ Harvey or Meryl Streep and Stan Kubrick and Kim Gordon, fallible, fantastic, inspiring people but just people like you trying to create and share beauty?”
That’s a small part of a monologue that ushers in IMustBe Leonardo’s “Kim Gordon,” a meditation on humanism, the power of creativity and the emptiness of organized religion. It’s an odd, intoxicating little glimpse into an idiosyncratic mind, spoken in uninflected tones by the Google reader, but even so, deeply, fundamentally human. When the spoken word fades, the music enters, a wispy, whispery voice asking repeatedly, “Why should...you need god…when you have Kim Gordon?” against a minimalist frame of acoustic strumming, which is just a bit later submerged in a most satisfying swell of amp feedback and dissonance. It’s a poem, a philosophy, a lo-fi acoustic lament and a blast of rock-and-roll mayhem all in one, and while certainly one of the most arresting tracks, not even the best thing on this eccentric album.
IMustBe Leonardo is a Berlin-based songwriter who has been making his oddball songs since around 2016. He gets a little radio play here and there, and a handful of people are ardent supporters, but you could spend a whole lifetime listening to music and not run across his work. That would be a shame. His outsider-y poetry is slow to light but catches fire on repeat plays. About half the tracks are hand-made rock songs, bolstered by clicky drum tracks and ravaged guitar tones. The other half are the maddest, most surreal campfire songs you ever heard, gently strummed but extremely odd.
Out of these, perhaps, consider “All the Poets Here” a murmured litany of wry observations about all the things that the poets are getting up to. The line lifts gently at the end of phrases, not so much a question implied as these evanescent thoughts blowing away on a slight breeze, and every sentence is a little koan. “Oh the poets here are naked and they feel like war/oh the poets here they say they’re crying when it rains/Oh the poets here don’t wash for days and weeks and months” and so on.
Other cuts are more taut and rhythmic, as for instance, “Government Press Office’s New Rattle,” with its staccato Young Marble Giants-ish guitar riff and punching drums. The cut might remind you of Lewsberg in its mordant chant that takes brief flights into melody, in its quiet tensions that erupt into noisy crescendos of guitar. There’s a song in there, a well-shaped melody, swamped almost entirely by ennui and static.
And indeed, the artist seems aware of his tenuous but legitimate claim on pop music. His song “Perfect Pop Song” rattles on like a wind-up toy, with its sharp hedges of guitar picking, its nonchalant chatter of verse. And yet, it is sort of a pop song. You can sing along after a bit. It creates an economical amalgam of melody and meaning, a unitary sort of structure that is exactly what it is, and then blows out that structure in a profusion of harmonies and vocal counterpoints.
This is a wonderful album, absolutely original and striking and unpremeditated. Listen to it a few times, and you might find yourself asking questions, like: Why do we need gods when we have human beings making beautiful little songs out of sticks and string and imagination? Why do we need forgiveness when art swaddles us in solace and connection and meaning? Why do we need religion at all when we have IMustBe Leonardo?
IMustBe Leonardo is a Berlin-based songwriter. In 2015 he started to play in many clubs and bars, and on January 2016 he released the EP “Wonderful”. On July 2017 he released his first album, "MOP" (it stands for "making other plans"), which got very good reviews all around the world (US, Ireland,
IMustBe Leonardo is a Berlin-based songwriter. In 2015 he started to play in many clubs and bars, and on January 2016 he released the EP “Wonderful”. On July 2017 he released his first album, "MOP" (it stands for "making other plans"), which got very good reviews all around the world (US, Ireland,
Non sapevi cosa leggere quest’estate? Ecco che ti accontentiamo! In rampa di lancio c’è il quinto numero di TRAKS INTERVIEW, il periodico dedicato alle interviste approfondite ai protagonisti della musica indipendente italiana, contiene le parole di: Pivirama, Paolo Tocco, LeSigarette!!, Soul Mutation, Florence Elysé, IMustBe Leonardo e Ell3.
Si era già parlato di IMustBe Leonardo in occasione dell’uscita del suo precedente ep, omonimo. Il cantante e compositore italiano, ma residente a Berlino, torna a farsi sentire questa volta con un lp, MOP, che contiene undici canzoni del tutto “autogestite”, in ogni aspetto, compresa la copertina. Le…
