Odd Beholder – Music

Hi, how are you? As the end of the year 2023, Daniela Weinmann aka Odd Beholder released her third full-length record “Feel Better”. The sensual and chromatic record was penned shortly after Weinmann’s grandfather took his own life as a part of a program called EXIT.* The material that resulted is an attempt to exorcise the spectres of grief and investigate the cultural and familial mechanics that led to his untimely departure. This is the record where the Odd Beholder travels back in time and tells a coming-of-age story in a small town in the 90s.

While writing this material, Daniela posted a statement to her social media channels stating, “Songs write themselves, in a way, and there is only so much about them that you can control.” She described the process as an act of translation, where the biggest challenge was to have the discipline “to allow the music and the words to come as they may.” The result is some of the most candid, emotionally infused material in the Odd Beholder catalog to date, set to a coercive melange of body music. There is a bit of Shoegaze, Electro-Pop, New Wave, and Techno here, but the end result is something wholly odd and fully beholderesque. Needless to say, the material came in a flash. It was recorded in Berlin with Douglas Greed behind the boards.

“Feel Better” is a record that was designed with the logic of a modern novel in mind – a non-linear series of vignettes that map the life-mosaic of the main character. The action takes place in the nineties, in a small provincial town in Switzerland, a place full of “bullies, marching bands, and peeping toms” (Rifle Club). Where “every time we had a family meeting, I thought I was a loser, I thought I was freak” (Dogs Like Me). ‘Woolen Sweater,’ is a portrait of a family waiting for the day of an assisted suicide procedure: “We could hold hands and say nothing together, you look so thin inside your woollen sweater.” ‘Insecurities’ deals with love knotted in all sorts of awkwardness and anxiety “I’ve always been but an awkward dreamer.” ‘Dirty Secret’ speaks to brutal lessons that only love can teach: “Will expose you, teach you how to cry, and tell you all your dirty secrets.” On ‘Just Because I Regret It,’ we find out that regret doesn’t necessarily “mean I won’t do it again and again.” ‘Patchwork Girl’ looks at how society uses a woman’s body as a screen to project all sorts of fears onto: “A man like Frankenstein just wasn’t able, to love his ugly daughter how he loved his ugly son.” ‘Then You Forgive Me’ speaks to emotional codependency and the art of manipulation: “First, you taught me how to blame myself, then you forgive me.” The record closes with a song called ‘Stupid Walk:’ “Healing takes more time than you have thought. Please just try to listen to your heart. You might wanna take a stupid walk in the park, your friends are wondering why you’re missing.”

“Feel Better” is a record about finding the courage to explore the dark spaces inside of you so that you can finally move on and live a life on your own terms!

*The program provides Swiss residents with access to trained medical professionals who assist them through the procedure.

Lost in Communication

Odd Beholder and Long Tall Jefferson’s collab EP saw the light of the day in the rainy spring of 2023. Experimenting with the format of the classic duet, they present you their first single «Self-Checkout» and beam you into the supermarket closest to your parent’s home, where you meet your first love again, years later. You contemplate the pampers in his/her shopping cart and the fact that yes, people move on and they have children with someone else than you. «Lost in Communication» is a very slow, relaxing and almost trippy journey of a song into the doom of online dating and the longing to find a home in someone.

Sunny Bay

Welcome to the «Sunny Bay»! Odd Beholders second album invites you into a run down hotel, a place filled with Schlagermusik and the smell of burnt Pizza. You’re the only guest because the hotel is actually closed (yes, pandemic times) – so make yourself comfortable. The waitress brings you a drink called «Eve of Destruction» and you wish yourself luck, glaring at the translucent plastic waste that decorates the beach.

About the new single «Disaster Movies»

«Disaster Movies» is Weinmann’s artistic extension of her political activism. Right after her debut album, she co-founded the Swiss branch of the international climate protection organisation “Music Declares Emergency”.

«Disaster Movies» is a comment on our decadence and our destructive consumerism. Weinmann speaks about the track:

«Two protagonists recall their teenage nonchalance, how they used to wish the whole damn town would burn down. They are now standing on the site of an actual catastrophe. Now that a monstrous flood has swallowed the entire town they don’t feel an inch of glee. Disappointed in their own premature disillusion, they feel like they have entered one of the disaster movies that they used to watch. What they quickly realise is that it doesn’t feel heroic at all. Instead everything seems dull and impractical, and terribly frightening.»

Sonically, «Disaster Movies» is rooted in bouncing arpeggios, it’s like a synth-pop soundtrack to a monstrous calamity unfolding in slow motion. The neon veneer of digital pop is being shredded before us by the brash reality of nature exhausted and drained.

About Odd Beholder

In Odd Beholder’s music, Weinmann precisely and laconically records the oddities, shadows and misunderstandings of our time. Her version of embracing dark pop music is a way of dealing with unpleasant truths, yet it’s also a way to seek some comfort.

While Odd Beholder’s debut album “All Reality Is Virtual” revolved around digitalisation, Weinmann’s second album “Sunny Bay” addresses the topic of nature, or rather the romantic notions and existential fears that nature triggers in us. Before that, Odd Beholder released two impressive EPs, “Lighting” (2016) and “Atlas” (2017). In 2018, “Remixes” was released; a tastefully curated EP to which The/Das, Fejka and Hundreds contributed their work.

Odd Beholder’s music is cinematic. The videos created for the music are always treated as conceptual art. The video clip for the single “Landscape Escape”, shot by Berlin filmmakers Grambow & Kirchknopf in Azerbaijan in cooperation with the Azerbaijan Social & Modern Dance Association, won the jury prize of the “Best Swiss Video Clip”-Awards 2017. The song is also used at a central point in the film “Mario”, which deals with the complicated handling of homosexuality in the world of football.

Odd Beholder has been invited to important festivals such as Great Escape (UK), Eurosonic (NL) or Reeperbahn Festival (DE), has toured in various formations in China, Italy, Germany and Switzerland and was explicitly asked by the Hamburg-based electro-pop duo Hundreds as well as by Bodi Bill to accompany their respective tours.

Over the course of various lockdowns and temporary border closures in 2020, Weinmann worked with Berlin musician Douglas Greed on the second Odd Beholder album “Sunny Bay”, which will finally be released this autumn.