Lennard Zander, a shape-shifter of sound and colour, hails from Germany’s northern stretches, now settled in Berlin’s bustle. Schooled in music but soured on its stiff spine, he fled the halls of theory to chase something wilder.
A painter as much as a player, Zander smears his music with texture: his sounds writhe, bleed, and blister; smudge and shimmer like oils on torn canvas. He’s a man with one foot in the orchestra pit and the other in the dirt, building bridges between the raw and the refined, one aching, unruly note at a time. His early days found him hollering in punk basements, sweat-soaked and unrepentant, even as he penned theatrical scores for hushed stages. From Schauspielhaus Hamburg to Elbphilharmonie, from squats to spotlight, he moves between chaos and calm, coarse noise and quiet nuance.
Now comes And The Mermaids, Lennard Zander’s latest offering; his second EP for Berlin’s La Double Vie, that strange and stirring label-meets-collective perched between gallery and ghost story.
These five pieces, recorded live in one continuous shiver during the cold breath of Winter 2024, drift like smoke through locked rooms. It’s music for sleepwalkers and storm-watchers, for those who listen with the lights off. There’s something of Syd Barrett’s cracked lullabies here, of Sibylle Baier’s hush, of Daniel Johnston’s wounded wisdom, and Popol Vuh’s holy drone echoing off cathedral ceilings. Zander doesn’t so much perform as conjure, drawing out low-end murmurs and long, rolling synth sighs that stretch like lightning across black hills, always on the verge of a thunderous break. The whole thing hums like unseen spectres from an abandoned dream, with gothic murmuring and buzzing at times beautiful in its decay, yet uneasy in its tranquility. There’s something Lynchian and Kubrikian about its everlasting hum throughout the entirety of the album, bringing to mind the mechanical groans of a factory mixed with the dissonant din of a disturbed mind. In this world, something sinister is building, hovering, waiting.
And The Mermaids drifts, it drones, and then it disappears.
Listen to the album below and order it here.
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