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Since 2014, Baal & Mortimer is the project of Alexandra Grübler, created in Düsseldorf, sonically exploring questions of resistance, autonomy, language, and identity. After the release of Earthrise on the label HEAVEN in 2018, her debut album Deixis will be released by Bureau B. She has collaborated with Black Merlin, Musiccargo, and Rupert Clervaux and was most recently a mentee of Laurel Halo for the Berlin Amplify program. Baal & Mortimer regularly presents her material in clubs, art spaces and festivals -- such as Torstrassenfestival Berlin or Open Source Festival in Düsseldorf -- approaching the sound of concrete potentialities in tone, body, and performance. The 13 tracks were written, recorded, and produced in bedrooms and studios throughout Düsseldorf and Berlin. Again and again, contrast and opposition are conjured up in a moment of eternal grip -- the never-arriving: "Atopos". Fragments of voices emerging from a brittle fog, icy traces of human activity and its mistakes. German, English, machine, human, male, female: corresponding to the same origin, changed, subdued and always elastic. "Prostheses" and "The Ship Of Fangs" were created during the Amplify Mentoring Program, in which Laurel Halo selected Baal & Mortimer to partake in a month-long residency. "Nathanaël" and "H/Délires" summon an elegiac echo of Düsseldorf -- where it all began at Salon des Amateurs -- and its legacy seeping through. Texture and mood of a city and its history, pushed forward by a granular humming, interspersed with fading voices, caryatids that hold everything together and yet fall. A non-linear time oscillating between grainy rhythms and the melancholic pull of soundscapes, eternally pushed by choral echoes, singing against themselves. The artwork is by artist and photographer Chris Filippini, capturing the space between heaven and earth. Spirit and matter, unity and duality; dissolving the boundaries until there are no more polarities. An inner being is taken apart and not reassembled; fragments that do not form a whole, and never have been whole; exhibited under glass they remain possibility and promise. Nathanaël, je te parlerai de tout.
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