Rasmus Weirup is not a conventional artist; not even close. On Ruhe, meine Seele, Op. 27, No. 1, the closing track from his new album Fehrbelliner Platz, the Danish musician and writer transforms an 1894 lied by Richard Strauss into a gothic meditation of drone, violence and exhausted stillness.
Karl Henckell’s words, traditionally carried by piano or orchestra, are recast through antique harmonium, aggressive live drums and guitars drawing upon the severe language of black metal. The composition’s late-romantic ache remains recognizable, but Weirup relocates it inside a far more unstable world. Serenity is invoked with every gesture suggesting that rest may no longer be possible.
The recording samples two words from Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann: “sondern fortgesetzt,” taken from the sentence “the war is no longer declared, only continued.” Detached from the complete line, the phrase becomes even more ominous; a fragment describing conflict as permanent background condition rather than exceptional event.
Fehrbelliner Platz emerged from an intense year in Berlin. Weirup wrote in U-Bahn carriages, parks, bars and club bathrooms, then recorded in a small rented room near the square that gives the album its name. Sessions often began in the early morning after nights of dancing, using a borrowed analogue synthesizer, a semi-broken electric guitar and an Indian harmonium carried from Copenhagen by FlixBus.
The track feels like Strauss passing through Berlin nightlife, historical violence bleeding into the present, and a soul commanded to be still while the world continues without pause.
ZR