LoneLady, MEN and other femmes mix it up for Berlin festival

On April 1, 2010

Tomorrow, Friday the 2nd of April, marks the start of Les Femmes s’en mêlant, a women’s indie music festival that’s going thirteen years strong in Paris and freshly exported for a Berlin edition. Now, je parlez non français, but my best attempt at translating the festival’s name would be “Women get mixed up”, and the lineup’s variety definitely reflects that: a rendez-vous of different styles. Spread over five discrete nights throughout this month, the twelve acts (mostly from outside Germany) offer a wide array of genres, from pop to folk to hip-hop, and even styles that are mixed up themselves – when’s the last time you went to an “electrobilly” show? The full line-up is listed below.

LoneLady (pictured left), the alias of singer/guitarist Julie Campbell, kicks things off Friday at Bang Bang Club. There doesn’t seem to be a single negative review of her recently released debut album Nerve Up (Warp Records). BBC Music put it succinctly: “There’s a refreshingly lo-fi squeal to the rickety guitar riffs on ‘Intuition’, and the early New Order-esque synth claps on the title-track give a carnivorous punch to a track that has a caffeine-fueled Gang of Four-era funk to it. It’s certain to provoke jittery dance moves from men with angular fringes in indie discos the country over.” Despite the overwhelming number of respected bands from her home city Manchester, she doesn’t seem to feel intimidated to live up to the standard, and carries the city’s rich musical history into the current day. Indeed, she deftly manages the whole retro-yet-current aesthetic; in the mixed-up spirit of this festival, I’ll call her sound “nowstalgiac”. Live footage from LoneLady is scarce, but you can check out a fresh clip below. Support this night comes from Lisa Papineau, who, aside from her solo material, has lent her voice to Air and M83.

The festival is spread out over the next few weeks at various locations, concluding with MEN (the trio seen on the right), the new band led by Le Tigre’s JD Samson, at Festsaal Kreuzberg on the 20th of April. Peaches picked them to open for her US tour last year, and she describes them as “totally out… contagious… they’re like the new Talking Heads.” MEN’s full-length debut is nearing completion for release later this year; in the meantime, Le Tigre’s collaboration with Christina Aguilera will appear on her album this June. (Underground, meet Mainstream. Mainstream, Underground.) A new interview with Samson can be heard on Expatriarch Radio #2 starting next Friday, the 9th of April.