it's time to protest!

The long awaited second album of the Viennese extraordinary artist Gustav aka Eva Jantschitsch is finished! I discovered her through the excellent German Magazin de:Bug.


For many people Gustav's critically acclaimed debut "Rettet die Wale ( save the whales ) was nothing more than rescuing the whole protest song genre. Besides the media artist and laptop-songwriter Gustav all of a sudden has become a new icon of the feminist music-scene and - concerning the movement of alter-globalization - the conscience of her generation.


In 2005 Gustav wins the prize of the Austrian Music Industry called Amadeus Award. At the peak of her success she consequently avoids further public appearances as a solo artist and concentrates on remittance work and a bunch of other quite different side projects, recently the queer burlesque theatre piece Orlanding The Dominant. The cross-gender alias Gustav represents a political thinking and basically media critical artist. The music sounds extremely ambivalent: catchy pop songs enter geeky la la laptop land and get infiltrated with some subversive aesthetic & political strategies: reinterpretation, exaggeration, ambiguity. All double layered by Gustavs unique voice. Gustav thinks that her new album Verlass die Stadt has gotten darker - politically and emotionally - than her debut. But thats exactly what you dont recognize in the first time. What makes the earnest of her music so comfortable is an easiness which comes together with a great sense of humour. Gustavs imagination combined with her pue nonchalance is simply amazing and leaves anybody in astonishment. Her songs are like musical roller coaster rides through all kind of possible and impossible genres: experimental laptop sound, but also traditional Austrian brass music, Schlager as well as Sicilian mandolins. Gustav plays with all the cliché and extravagance of each different style - and leads the listener often to the garden path/leaves the listener in confusion. Theres an enormous gap between the cozy appeal of her music and the topics of the songs. Cause: the situation is definitely serious and theres really NO reason to tell anybody: all clear. Cause it isnt. Not at all. Behind Gustav Eva Jantschitsch lives and works in Vienna as an artist. She composes music for theater, movies and iPods. Gustav produces songs on the laptop, plays all kinds of instruments and "sings with the sort of inimitable power you cannot muster up any resistance to". With an origin in Vienna, Gustav's tunes are in various languages, sometimes English, sometimes French, sometimes German - " but the appeal ist completely universelle".