Pop, rock & jazz

DOTA - In the farthest of the far away

Tuesday, 14/11/2023 / 08:00 PM / Forum Merzhausen

In der fernsten der Fernen" - Mascha Kaléko for the second time After the great success of the first album, the Berlin band DOTA once again dedicates itself musically to the texts of the poet Mascha Kaléko.

Dota hits the nerve of her time, or several at once, with her music, which jumps and dances, pauses, jumps off the quarry pond jetty, swims and dives. She mixes folk and indietronica and lets her love for Brazilian music flash here and there. Her lyrics touch with immediacy, Dota doesn't talk about the ivory tower, but about the people here and now and their small triumphs and big abysses, their inadequacies to try to be close and to move in company. She wins the Fred Jay Prize and the German Record Critics' Award, she unintentionally writes little hymns, makes record after record, always imagining her best song in the future, despite great success with the public. At one of the concerts, a fan slips her a booklet by Mascha Kaléko. Dota is thrilled by the directness of the poems, the brevity of the language and makes the plan to make music out of the texts. The simple elegance and timeless radiance of her poetry fits Dota like a glove. Dota Kehr is from Berlin, writes lyrics, sings and has been playing concerts since 2013 in the line-up with Jan Rohrbach (git), Janis Görlich (dr) and Jonas Hauer (keys) under the band name DOTA. Dota and her band have added an extra layer to the poems, new colors, sometimes contrasting with the text, and managed the feat that you never once think of poetry with musical accompaniment while listening to the songs. Dota has brought Mascha Kaléko's lyrics into our time, even more: they sound as if they were written now, in this form.

Mascha Kaléko began writing in Berlin in the twenties of the last century, the early poems are pointed sketches of everyday life in Berlinese. This sister in the spirit of a Joachim Ringelnatz or Erich Kästner creates her intimate, sometimes ironic, often heartbreakingly soulful metropolitan poetry in the 1920s and 30s in Berlin. She is the voice of young people struggling to make ends meet in the big city. She is as much in love, as tired, as sad, and as much at a loss for words as they are. Her success as a writer comes to an abrupt end when the Nazis take power. As a Jew, she is no longer allowed to publish. In 1938 she left Berlin, but the city remained her fixed point of reference. In one of her last poems, "Bleibtreu is the name of the street," she writes, "40 years ago I lived here [...] Here was my happiness at home. And my need. Here my child was born. And had to leave. Here my friends and the Gestapo visited me", she concludes with the question "What remained of it? [...] an old wound unscarred"

Dota was able to inspire numerous well-known colleagues for this homage to Mascha Kaléko and invite them into the studio. The new album features Dirk von Lowtzow (Tocotronic), Sarah Lesch, Gisbert zu Knyphausen, Funny van Dannen and numerous other well-known surprise guests.

In 2020 DOTA's first album with Kaléko settings was released (,,Kaléko" stayed in the album charts for 8 weeks, entering at number 13). From September 2023 DOTA will go on tour with her second Kaléko album ,,In der fernsten der Fernen". Joining them will be duet partner Wencke Wollny aka Charlemagne, who will also contribute saxophone and bass clarinet, Janis Görlich (drums), Jan Rohrbach (guitar), Jonas Hauer (keyboards) and Antonia Hausmann (trombone). There will be songs from the two Kaléko albums and some of the band's own pieces. Acoustic, concertante, rousing: ,,KALÈKO" is a musically outstanding tribute to the wonderful work of Mascha Kaléko by one of the most interesting current German-language bands!

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