Q&A: Rosa Anschütz Invites Listeners into Her Visionary World with New Album, ‘Sabbatical’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY GIONA CIACCO ☆
Mixing hauntingly melodic vocals with poetic spoken word, Rosa Anschütz challenges genre with her new album, Sabbatical, releasing September 26. Written, composed, and produced by the Berlin-born artist, this marks her first international release. Its experimental and cinematic sound transports listeners into the singer’s dark and beautiful universe, paying homage to her roots in the post-punk wave sound.
It's 14 tracks, written at different points in Rosa’s career, symbolizing the ending of her own “sabbatical” during which she healed some parts of her past.
“I don't believe that we can let go of things if we don't really work through them,” says Rosa. “They will stick with us, and then they become an excuse for our behavior in the present.”
With a diploma in Transmedia Arts from the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Rosa is not only a musician but an artist. Her skills expand to videography, poetry, photography, sculpture, and most recently, scoring film, which contributes to Sabbatical’s cinematic feel. The album’s atmosphere is elevated by its 14 corresponding music videos, their stylistic grain, retro flair, and spellbinding visuals, self-produced by Rosa on her 2000s digicam.
Rosa sat down with Luna to chat about Sabbatical’s creation process, the production of her music videos, and the story behind the album’s cover.
LUNA: How would you describe your music in one sentence?
ROSA: A poetic outlet of my experiences of life.
LUNA: How do you incorporate your transmedia skills into your music?
ROSA: Well, every album has a cover, and it has the press photos that need to be planned. So I always kind of do everything, or plan it all. On this album, especially, I made a music video for each track, so there are 14 tracks, and they all come with a music video. That was very much part of the whole process of Sabbatical, like shooting these music videos.
LUNA: Since you mentioned the new album, we can jump right into Sabbatical. How does it differ from your previous releases?
ROSA: [Sabbatical] kind of goes back to how I initially started to make music. So it's a lot of guitar and bass, which I play on the record myself. I play all the instruments other than the drums; they were played by a drummer.
It goes a little bit back to a more post-punk wave sound, which is the music I initially grounded my tastes [in] when I was younger. For different circumstances, I ventured from the first album, which was very electronic, to something more classical with the album last year, Interior.
[With Sabbatical], there was this desire to rewrite some of the songs from back in the day and merge them with tracks that I had written last year.
LUNA: When I was listening to Sabbatical, it reminded me a lot of ‘80s music with the use of synth and experimental instrumentals, especially Depeche Mode. Did you draw inspiration from the '80s for this album?
ROSA: Not as like “I want this sound,” but I feel very close to the emotionality of ‘80s music, or goth-influenced music. It has all these pop gestures, as a genre, but the mood is a bit different. There's a depth to it, there's a darkness to cult wave, dark wave, which I can relate to more.
Right now, we're kind of in a similar situation to the ‘80s, almost. There’s a lot of regression happening, and the world is going to sh*t. It's a very uncertain time. And so I think there's some kind of playfulness of honesty in that genre.
LUNA: Does that relate to the name Sabbatical?
ROSA: Yeah, Sabbatical was meant as a fun gesture of capitalist society. [It’s a] very American thing, but we’re also doing it here in Germany, like the sabbatical year, taking off work.
It could be seen in two ways. So “sabbatical” was the process of writing the songs, going through some topics I hadn't fully evolved through in songwriting before, as an attempt at healing. Then also, you could see it as like, “Okay, so you've done the look back at the past, and now you can go forward.” I was thinking of the record as a very positive record; it's not tragic any longer, you're kind of floating above your issues.
LUNA: The order of Sabbatical seems to move from the past with the dark tale of “Eva,” to the hopeful present with the line “There’s always a way,” in “Swan Song.” Was this the story you were trying to tell?
ROSA: Very much! So “Eva” stands in the beginning…as a perception of women coming from way back. There are some songs that do have a darker twist to them, so I felt like putting “Swan Song” at the end with the message, “There's always a way out,” is nice. I do believe in that.
LUNA: Do you have a favorite song on Sabbatical?
ROSA: It differs. Last week I played it live for the first time, which I very much enjoyed. I took the bass with me on stage, which I haven't done for a while; there's such a performative aspect of instruments on stage. I enjoyed “Watch Me Disappear” a lot because the bass line is very fast, and the speaking part, “I spit on the roots that I come from,” is very distinct. I think, whatever mood I find myself in right now, I could choose a track from that album to help me get through it.
LUNA: So you’ve already pre-released three music videos for Sabbatical, filmed and edited by you, and starring you. What was your creation process like?
ROSA: I was on an island artist residency, so I was spending all of March on an island in Europe. I had all the time in the world, like, a whole month to shoot these music videos. So what I did was I put a tripod, I put a JBL speaker, and I filmed. I was going back and forth, filming a short sequence, seeing is the angle nice? Is the image nice? Am I actually in the picture?’ Until I found out that you can flip the screen of the camera, it was a digicam from the 2000s.
I also had some material from earlier on. There were some ideas for music videos that I had brought the equipment, the props, I had the outfit for like, two years. I could really finish some stuff that I wanted to do for ages, that was great.
LUNA: I noticed in these music videos that you’ve gained a new tattoo on your throat. Is there a story behind it?
ROSA: I do some trips at times by myself, and this happened on one of them. I made these drawings; it was kind of a very strange coincidence. There was some eclipse two nights before, I felt very strange. I made all these, like small drawings. This [tattoo] is supposed to be like a Poppy flower. Then I did this journey, and I just went to the tattoo shop. I wanted the throat for a long time, as such a conflicting space on the body of being on stage and using words mainly as an expression.
LUNA: Sabbatical’s cover features a collection of objects. Why did you choose these objects?
ROSA: It came across more as a coincidence. I had a photo shoot with a friend of mine who also did the previous covers, and we did all these photos. I really like them still, but none of them I could decide “Okay, this is going to be the album cover,” because some of [the songs] were written in 2016, some of them last year. I couldn't find one image of this recent shoot that brings it all together. So, I had to renew my passport to apply for the US visa because I might go on tour in the US, and I was, like, desperate, because I had a deadline. I made this mock shot for the passport, the one that's on the cover, and it was just laying on my table.
I looked at it, and I was like, “Ah, this is the beginning, like, the record is finished. Something new is happening.” When you renew your passport, you're entering a new part of your identification, basically. So, I saw it on my glass table and I just filmed it with my camera that I used for the music videos. The other things were lying there, it's my key, it's my lipstick, and the eucalyptus oil for the throat, it's very real; they were all just there. I thought, like, okay, that makes so much sense, because this album is real, there was a different touch to the songwriting, the songwriting is quite direct on this album. And so I felt like, okay, just take it as it came to me, and it felt right, and then I trusted that.
LUNA: Did you adjust the songs on Sabbatical that were from 2016, or did you leave them as they were?
ROSA: I mean, I did rewrite some of the musical parts and adjusted the lyrics to bring it all together in the end. “Plaster Copy” and “Watch Me Disappear” are the oldest. I wouldn't look back at [the lyrics] “I spit on the roots that I come from,” as in that kind of impulsiveness, I would be more at ease, glad that the situation has changed. It was written at a certain time, and as I was writing it at that time, I meant it like that. So it's nice to finally put it somewhere. I don't believe that we can let go of things if we don't really work through them; they will stick with us, and then they become an excuse for our behavior in the present.
LUNA: Your first language is German. Why did you decide to make music in English?
ROSA: When I grew up there was a lot of German, of course, but I grew up on this countryside where my studio also is right now. I live in the city, but I go here a lot, and we have a house here. My parents both spend so much time in America, they had a lot of friends visiting. So we had these nice parties here, and there was a lot of English around me, like the closest friends of my parents are English-speaking.
I think maybe sometimes, in not being a native speaker, things come across by not knowing things. It's like you play an instrument, but you don't know how to read notes, or you don't know how to do it exactly, and then you kind of do it your own way, and something else comes out of it.
LUNA: You don’t confine yourself to a genre. Does that give you more freedom to express yourself?
ROSA: When you're not following one style, it's hard, the identification will more be on your side as a person, rather than on your music. Because with every release and every difference of the releases, you will gain some new people that are like, “Oh, now she's doing classical music or something.” But you will also lose [people] apparently. There was a time when I was very much with electronic techno stuff, and I have no idea if they will listen to Sabbatical. In terms of concert bookings, like, all these things that I need to survive makes it a bit harder, but it's more real. I think the authenticity of my work is more important to me. Of course I want to play the big stages and all that stuff, but when it comes to a rich life, it's more like the authenticity of your work than how it's going to be put there. When I look at the audience of my concerts, it's very different people like, it's very identifiable which album they entered during. I like that.
LUNA: Have you gotten more confident in doing what you want since you started music?
ROSA: Definitely, yeah.
LUNA: Did that change when you went to Vienna for school?
ROSA: I mean, it was important to focus on Vienna because my youth in Berlin was very troublesome - there were a few leads on it in Sabbatical. Vienna brought clarity, and confidence builds from clarity as well; you build your backbone.
I just encountered a very absurd situation where I was really like, “Oh, wow, I feel pushed a few years back.” But the way I was able to deal with it was different. I thought of it like there's this room between me and that person, and I won't let them be able to open the door. That was when I thought, “Okay, something has changed.”
LUNA: You practice many different artistic mediums like art, videography, photography, poetry and music. Have you always been this artistic?
ROSA: Yeah, it all started here. I grew up in a very artsy environment; everyone in my family is doing something within the arts. I was very supported. I think it would have been a great surprise if I would have decided to become a dentist or something. I think it's a good thing when [your artistic] core builds from somewhere that is not connected to any kind of institution. You get to define your taste. It's nice when you can come back to a core idea of what you actually want from your creativity.
LUNA: You’re very involved in the creation of your music from the writing and composition to the production. Does that change your relationship with your music?
ROSA: It does. The Sabbatical writing was very, the songs have this length to them, some of them. So I became very involved in the way I want this to be expressed, there's some almost like acting parts in it. How do I want the performance of my voice to be? Like, the different tempers of the expression, that's linked to composition.
I did two scoring jobs last year for the first time. I scored a movie and a documentary. And I think that very much influenced how I took the approach on this album. Music is so manipulative at times with certain ideas of like, where do I put the bass? Or how the track will get even stronger with some kind of expression? So, yeah, I took that very much into consideration on Sabbatical.
Rosa Anschütz’s new album Sabbatical releases September 26 on all streaming platforms and Bandcamp. Rosa’s self-produced music videos can be found on her YouTube channel, and the album can be purchased on vinyl from Heartworm Press’ website.
