It’s the result of one night. Recorded from nine o’clock in the evening until dawn. The Munich pop poet Philip Bradatsch recorded and sang nine songs in front of the microphones of the producer and studio operator Dennis Rux in Hamburg with an acoustic guitar. Material that was lying around and not related to his band Cola Rum Boys wanted to fit. The night before, the two had stopped by a couple of bars out of sheer joy of seeing each other again and then they sat there the next evening and leveled the microphones, the slight fog still in their heads.
And Bradatsch moves his listeners a little further into the ear. The fingernails of the right hand hit the steel sides. Breathe in. Here we go. “How you do it, that you dissolve like a pill in sparkling water. Just melt in the world…” a voice like aspirin, tingling softly against the dull throbbing of life. Then an organ comes in, which Bradatsch later dabbed on. A bowed double bass is flanked by percussion. And Laila Mahmoud’s kanun rises into the dark sky, an oriental zither that sounds a little like a plucked dulcimer and also looks similar. Sounds that dissolve in the room with long echoes.
In retrospect, Philip Bradatsch’s recordings were subtly overdubbed without giving in to the temptation to overdub them and stretch a safety net beneath this tightrope walker over the abyss of night: “I’m lying awake next to my lightbulb graveyard / I just don’t want to be in that Die rummaging,” he sings in “No One Knows How I Really Feel”. Fear was a reliable companion in these past years, even when Bradatsch thought he was going to crash with his songs.
A lonely song like “Don’t rely on me” manages to put our world, which is falling apart in slow motion, back together for two minutes with all its simple melodic beauty from bygone songwriting days. Bradatsch sings later from the 80th floor. In a “house that doesn’t exist”, “in the city that doesn’t exist”. Here will be a girl waiting for the man. And if you don’t look at the liner notes of the album, you fail to notice that this word-tone structure, which is decoupled from the earthly gravity, is not by Bradatsch at all, but originally by Hildegard Knef. A psychedelic dream, originally released in 1970. Refined here with a sighing background choir and saxophone that makes you think you’re drinking eggnog in the egg chair.
But even yesterday it was never as glorious as one fantasizes today: “Carson McCullers” Bradatsch called a number. A sad organ leans in the door frame: “On all fours on the kitchen floor. Flew way too high again last night. Some days everything slips away.” Carson McCullers: One who cut into the skin of the American Southern States with her sentences and according to whose books nothing is what it used to be. One whose body dissolved as it dissolved the society around it. In Bradatsch’s song, the name is a point of reference for a feeling. At the very end you can hear a last breath escaping the saxophone.