Canadian Michelle Gurevich, the glamorously fatal lo-fi chansonnier of Russian origin who has seduced us many times with her smoke-shrouded confessions from dive bars, late hours and empty excesses, is returning to Šiška. She’ll present her latest album, Ecstasy in the Shadow of Ecstasy, on which she devotes herself to the search for boundless desire.
The daughter of a Kirov ballerina and an engineer from Leningrad, Michelle Gurevich grew up listening to her parents’ collection of Soviet and 1970s European records. Her bedroom-produced debut album Party Girl, released under the now-discarded moniker Chinawoman, introduced her signature sound. Manoeuvring between grandiose retro motifs and a surprising sincerity, her songs are tragicomic, melody-driven, sentimental and suspended in shadowy glamour. She combines humour with dark realism in smoky and intimate ballads delivered with cutting and fatalistic lyrics.
With shows regularly selling out in cities like Istanbul, Berlin, Warsaw and Athens, she has established a niche that includes the East European diaspora, the Berlin queer scene, and those with a taste for the melodramatic balladry of Charles Aznavour, Zeki Müren and Nikolai Slichenko.
Michelle Gurevich’s sixth album, Ecstasy in the Shadow of Ecstasy, released in 2020, finds new opportunities for rawness and vulnerability in a collection of songs about desire without end. The recurring themes are elation sought and remembered, the art and taste for living, romantic friends until the end, and roads not taken. Decadent, dramatic and earnest, vintage keyboards and synth strings offer the solitary rendition of a grand experience, and a voice always upfront delivers motifs familiar yet impossible to pinpoint from the great soup of European chanson.
Twin Sons is the alias of Scottish multi-instrumentalist Robin Thomson, who has been producing his own brand of lo-fi pop gloom for the past decade in his adopted hometown, Berlin. His most recent EP “Can You Feel It?” continues his melancholic exploration of intimacies and failures. Recorded at home during lockdown in 2020, he emerged with an album that wanders through a landscape of listlessness and longing. He has been a member of Michelle Gurevich’s live band since 2010 and toured extensively as drummer with Canadian indie-pop group The Hidden Cameras.
Tickets on sale online and at Eventim outlets.
Organisation: Kino Šiška.
