Laura Harker chats with one of Berlin’s most cherished electro-pop maestros… 

Barbara Morgenstern’s unpretentious ‘girl-next-door’ look belies her position as one of the most consistent figures in Berlin’s indie music firmament. The musician and producer has been a stalwart of the scene for almost two decades, and in that time has worked with many big names including To Rococo Rot’s Robert Lippok and dub-techno producer Pole.

Morgenstern’s musical career has gradually developed from the dots-and-dashes electro of 1999’s Vermona Et6-1 to the more melodic structures of her later work. After a recent three-year radio silence—spent largely with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt choir—she has returned with a new record, Doppelstern, an album which features Berlin favourites Gudrun Gut and T. Raumschmiere among the many collaborators.

Though known for singing in both German and English (since 2012’s Sweet Silence), Doppelstern is her first work to switch between both languages, an unusual move she puts down to a lack of German amongst some of her collaborators on the record. The record offers a Morgenstern-esque mix of electronica and indie pop melodies filtered through hazy, even nebulous dreamscapes.

What does the new album tell us about where you are currently at as a musician and artist?

I was very curious about what would happen if I worked with so many different musicians. Diving into so many different setups, working with so many different musicians, was a very exciting challenge. It was the next step to make a new experiences in music and to develop: music for me is a long, never-ending search for something new.

Was there a concept behind the record?

The concept of the Doppelstern album was that there was no concept. Nothing was prepared, and we wanted to take the moment and see what we could do together. What are we interested in right now? What’s the common denominator? These were the ideas we were most interested in. It was also just the thrill to work with musicians who I like and adore. The list of musicians, with whom I would love to work became longer and longer and, as I’m not a big fan of postponed ideas, it was time to let it happen. Doppelstern became an album with eleven spaces for songs; each song is a world of its own.

It’s your first album for three years: what’s been happening in the meantime?

Choir, choir, choir! I’m head of the Chor der Kulturen der Welt at the House of World Cultures and we’ve been quite busy performing at exhibitions, like Berlin Atonal, with electronic music pioneer Hans-Joachim-Roedelius. Right now I’m developing a piece with Ari Benjamin Meyers, (an American contemporary composer) and Hauschka for the choir. I love this kind of work, because it’s conceptual and offers a lot of possibilities in music. The choir feature partly on Doppelstern as well as in the last song, Den kommenden Morgen with Jacaszek. Besides that I worked with the great ‘theatre directors team’