Linda & Lukas Vogel

Hardly any other classical instrument still has as many clichés attached to it as the harp: It is supposed to sound sensual, harmonious, fragile, even ethereal. Swiss musician Linda Vogel already showed that the harp can also elicit completely different sounds with her debut album Maps to Others, released in 2019, on which she used effects devices and computer-controlled hammers to make the instrument sound sometimes like a guitar, sometimes like a synthesizer in experimental pop songs. Together with her brother Lukas Vogel, part of the internationally successful piano-electronica duo Grandbrothers, things are now much heavier, darker, more industrial. Between fragmented beats, distorted violin-like sounds and cutting-metallic spectra, the typical harp arpeggios flash out only briefly, only to be immediately alienated again and absorbed into the duo's shimmering-electronic overall sound. Lukas Vogel operates synthesizers, effects and at the same time is able to make the strings of the harp vibrate electromagnetically via an apparatus. Electronic and acoustic, mechanical and organic, strings and oscillators merge irrevocably here - always carried by a third instrument that pervades the songs: Linda Vogel's voice, dark, repetitive, hypnotic.