Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans.
Susanne Oberbeck, otherwise known as No Bra, is an electronic musician, producer and performer now living in New York, who has achieved cult status on account of her offbeat brand of industrial music and her tendency to subvert gender norms. Originally from the German countryside, just north of Hamburg, Oberbeck rejected convention from an early age–in a recent interview with The Guardian, she describes reading Simone de Beauvoir at 15 as “the only thing I could see that was remotely relatable.” Released this month, LOVE & POWER is Oberbeck‘s third album, and her first long form project since 2013’s Candy. Bold, defiant and endlessly experimental, LOVE & POWER imagines new possibilities for empathy, intimacy, gender identities and expression. Musing on sadomasochism, cruising, and the link between sex and money, the record expresses the craftiness and wit it takes to live in these strange times, whilst living, as Oberbeck does, against them.
To celebrate the launch of her new album—with sleeve photography by Wolfgang Tillmans, a friend of hers for over twenty years—Oberbeck has selected five songs from LOVE & POWER to expand upon for SLEEK.
Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans.
“Hypnotizing Powerful People”
“This song is really about how I see society following the wrong values. Money and quantity is valued more than ideas or authenticity (“maybe in the future you will be romantic”). Artists are framed as weird, crazy people even though other people are making money off their work and ideas. Larger companies are blatantly stealing things and because they have the money to do it, we can’t do much about it. Spotify and other platforms get someone rich while musicians make next to nothing. I think the power of money has to be taken away by people valuing other things. Also, maybe some kind of basic income [needs to be introduced] to make people less dependent on the companies. This all ties in with a worship of stereotypical masculine values which seem to be linked, so I talk about my personal disillusionment with that.”
“Divine Swipe”
“The idea for this song came when I was talking to a friend about how in the future gay or any dating apps won’t be on your phone, but actually integrated in your body somehow, and how you will pay for things by swiping your asscrack. It’s a bit silly. Then it also goes into this idea about bodies morphing, people changing shapes and becoming one as a futuristic form of having sex.”
Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans.
“Dysphoricize”
“Dysphoria is not just a passive thing that happens to a person, or their own problem. It is actively inflicted on people by how others respond to body shape, gender presentation and unconscious assumptions. So I‘m making up a verb, ‘to dysphoricize’, and protesting against it.”
“Hard City”
“Hard City is about the idea that “cruising” should be available to women too. I‘m trying to expose the subject/object duality, so it’s about a character that switches genders whilst cruising downtown NYC.”
“No Money”
“No Money was intended as a satire of a style of pop music that worships money, affluence and the ‘American Dream’. I wanted it to have this auto tune effect that mimics particular pop songs, but it turned out different –– more eerie. It became its own thing.”
LOVE & POWER is out now. No Bra will perform with Nkisi on 5 December 2019 at the ICA.