SOAP&SKIN

The song with which Anja Plaschg alias Soap&Skin concludes her current album "Torso", consisting of twelve cover versions, couldn't fit the times better: "The End", the Doors classic that was once plunged into the greatest darkness by Nico. Soap&Skin, however, manages to find something comforting in the apocalyptic. Maik Brüggemeyer wrote in his column that their version is "warmer, more childlike, more lost in dreams and more otherworldly - or, to use a Peter Handke word, more otherworldly" than the original. A term that applies to her entire oeuvre: the Austrian transcends pieces by Cat Power or David Bowie and turns her own compositions into shimmering, ethereal, art-musical dramas. In everything she does, she allows herself to be vulnerable. She recently explained in an interview: Making an entire album of cover versions "filled me with a certain unease at first. I was afraid that it would be interpreted as me having no more ideas." No fear was ever so unfounded.