raw

Artwork photographies by Bảo Ngô, Bioplastic Rose, Bioplastic Water Bra and Single Row Tutu by Caroline Zimbalist, Nails by Barber Spa BK, Post production by Thomas Lambertz

On November 8th, Totenhagen released their latest album RAW. It is the mothership of excerpts from 5 improvised duos, available now digitally and soon on vinyl (Pre-order here). Individual EPs from the sessions with each musician will be released throughout 2025.

Musicians featured on RAW are:

DoYeon Kim (Gayageum)

Sara Schoenbeck (Bassoon)

Nick Dunston (Double Bass)

Anton Kaun (Noise-Art)

Lucy Liebe (Guitar + Fx)

Nature does not deal in “too much”. Totenhagen is its medium, and Raw is Totenhagen in a nutshell. The artistic manifestation of the Divine Feminine, she distances herself from the normative baggage of her roots through collaborative works-in-progress, taking us on a journey to the evolution of her actual self. Blending audio-visual genres, Totenhagen embraces the light, approachable and aesthetically sharp just as much as the dark, unfamiliar, and angular. Monothematic predictabilities make way for the entire cosmos of her personality – an artist who prefers to evolve rather than tread water. Vitality is movement. For those open to teasing their own expectations, taking musicians at their word, and listening attentively, Raw will reveal just how liberating it can be to take a step back and laugh in the face of your own comfort zone. 

Laura Totenhagen’s many different faces form a prism at the far end of an imaginary tunnel; this eclecticism is far from arbitrary. She is more butterfly than chameleon, and it is metamorphosis and new beginnings for which Raw stands: for the first time, the Cologne-based singer’s various artistic incarnations are all on display like the many faces of a Rubik’s Cube. The contemplative reductionism of her previous band project of the same name, which virtuosically navigated the boundaries of minimalist creative music, has been replaced by a certain maximalism which reflects Totenhagen’s inner and outer dynamic spectrum in all its kaleidoscopic variety. Conceptionally courageous, yet never pretentious, both tender and ruthless methods breathe new life into her family name. She bellows, twitters, squelches, sings. Totenhagen embodies the emancipated transformation of her own academically informed mindset to a multi-dimensional work of art in the realm of here-there-be-dragons. 

True revolution works best with like-minded souls – a fact Laura Totenhagen has taken to heart. On Raw, once again, she is by no means a solitary artist. She takes a leap, musically and visually, onto a new playing field with an exclusive selection of international duo partners. Allies in spirit, en route to a new form of intuitive expression that does not adhere to any supposed rulebook and remains ever authentic. Any expectation of an approach based on tried-and-true principles of improvisation would be sorely misled when it comes to Totenhagen. In the art world, the term ‘Avantgarde’ wears a goatee. The inherent beauty of the raw is a phenomenon most prevalently explored in the largely untainted tradition of hardcore culture, a scene with a close connection to intersectional feminism. So, it is no coincidence that on Raw, Laura Totenhagen and her highly diverse selection of exceptional musicians, DoYeon Kim, Sara Schoenbeck, Nick Dunston, Anton Kaun and Lucy Liebe, have delivered a somewhat radical statement in the shape of a 34-minute LP, plus five equivalent EPs that will follow successively. An eclectic roller coaster ride, with Totenhagen’s voice the tracks that connect the genre-bending improvisations with both onomatopoetic density and (un)intentionally humorous approaches, epic hyperdynamic excesses culminating in a lyrical finale.

Like in “Grill, Roast, Spark”, a kind of upward free-fall for double bass and vocal break. Nick Dunston is both a guardian and innovator of Afro-American modern creative on the bass and together with Totenhagen tears the dynamic rip in the seam of the LP. Side A, which focuses on the great art of instant composing, opens with an imposing duo with Korean NYC-based DoYeon Kim (also a member of Nick Dunston’s “Spider Season” project). There is a certain insectoid character to pieces such as “Soil Dwellers in Limbo”. With a highly unique technique, Kim has devoted herself to innovatively updating traditional Korean music on the stringed instrument gayageum. Scuttling along or rocking hard, Kim’s playing can cradle Totenhagen’s vocalises or challenge them with counterpoint. Sara Schoenbeck’s deft bassoon playing meeting Totenhagen’s imaginative storytelling provokes a bit of a double take. Psychedelically, we dream ourselves into the chamber music salon of a bygone century, only to startle awake in a Brooklyn recording studio in 2024. With a sensitivity to dynamics and dramaturgy second to none, Totenhagen and the American avantgarde-jazz bassoonist create immediate ethereal soundscapes that entertainingly switch between the progressive demands of creative music and the aesthetic of contemporary art music. Growth as a statement, achieved through maximum hybridisation - “Shallowtail Butterfly”. 

Side B is a B-movie: With reverb, makeup, and the metallic smell of an industrial workshop, Totenhagen’s explorations on “Storm of the Microbats” torque into gritty feedback loops. In a wild joint venture with the Munich-based audio-visual electronic artist Anton Kaun, also known as “Rumpeln”, she finally takes the good-girl bull by the horns and chases it over an electro-acoustic minefield of stereotypes well overdue for destruction. An entire battery of processed vocals and live electronics take a noise bath in our sensory receptors and demand emphatically, cracklingly: Turn it up! “Sky Doll” most strikingly exemplifies the fact that the pieces on Raw are neither entirely improvised nor entirely composed. The closing track by Totenhagen and Berlin-based Lucy Liebe, a fearless multi-instrumentalist whose unique path has crossed both jazz and dream pop, leaves no margin for either/or. Keep the volume up high and lean back in graceful resignation to revel in the walls of reverb on guitar and voice: throbbing landscapes distilled to their essence, air sparkling on the horizon, an end-of-summer hit.

The concept album’s feminist colour codes and subversively converge with the works of costume designer and sculptor Caroline Zimbalist and photographer Bảo Ngô, both of whom are based in NYC. Lavender, meaty red and berry tones: This sweet and disturbing sensual aesthetic mirrors the challenges to musical conventions on this record, which in turn reflects Totenhagen’s vision of brutal honesty in art. Raw should by no means be confused with a misunderstood appetite for ugliness. This audio-visually symbiotic take on the “art of the duo” (possibly the most archaic of all constellations) is like a hot pressure cooker, concocting an extraordinary variety of emotional aggregates in both its creator and audience. We bear witness to the ultimate totenhagian dialectic in all its expressive parameters and cannot ignore how such artistic ruthlessness can reveal so much depth, ease and humour.

RAW, an anagram of WAR, is a crusade against the alienation of one’s true nature, in which Totenhagen – like ‘Final Girl’ Ellen Ripley – bares her teeth at the patriarchal expectation-fetishism of her time in the ‘unsafe space’ of an all too organic H. R. Giger set. This record is entertaining and leaves you hungry for more. A charming provocation that reverberates in our whirring minds – between beauty, the shadows, and (supposedly) grime. Surrender!

Liner Notes written by Louis Rastig (german version here) and translated by Ursula Martyn-Ellis.

RAW lettering designed by Vincent Wagner, and post production by Thomas Lambertz

Recorded by
Lily Wen (Track 1-4) at Figure 8 Recordings Brooklyn, NYC
Reinhard Kobialka (Track 5-6) at TOPAZ - audio studios, Cologne
Daniel Door (Track 7) SVS Studios, Munich
Dominik Ehrl (Track 8) Watt Matters Studio, Bielefeld

Mixed by
Christian Heck (Tracks 1-6)
Manu Rzytki (Track 7)
Lucy Liebe (Track 8)

Mastered by Lukas Fehling

Artwork photographies by Bảo Ngô
Bioplastic Rose, Bioplastic Water Bra and Single Row Tutu by Caroline Zimbalist
Nails by Barber Spa BK
Post production by Thomas Lambertz
Raw Lettering by Vincent Wagner
Liner Notes by Louis Rastig

Production Management by Trace
Conceptual consulting by Louis Rastig
Administration & controlling by Aufklang

Art direction by Laura Totenhagen