Andy Aquarius: New Energy
The experimental harpist draws inspiration from ambient black metal and the Sardinian mountains
There’s this famous story about Brian Eno. It appeared first in the liner notes to Discreet Music.
Hospitalized after an accident, the composer listened to a record of 18th century harp music on very low volume. The string sounds blended with the rain patter from outside, leading him to the idea of creating truly ‘ambient’ music.
I have always loved harp for that special, immersive quality. Something about the instrument’s sound soothes me and touches me deep inside, like a portal into a magical, long-forgotten world.
Last year, I heard some gorgeous harp sounds on a community radio show. Shazaming the tune, I found out it was “U Lisi” by Andy Aquarius. When that very artist reached out to me earlier this year, pointing me to a new body of work, I took it as a sign from the universe.
A few weeks later I am sitting in a café in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, talking to a calm, introverted man with long, straight brown hair, looking like a mix of young Aragorn and an Austrian mountain-climber.
Andy is just about to release his second solo album, Golla Gorroppu, which his label describes as ‘animist folklore sung from the throat of a Celtic harp‘.
“I never liked popular music”, Andy says. “In my youth, I was pretty much a loner and an outsider, feeling alienated from the people of my small town.”
Growing up in the Bavarian countryside, Andy started classical piano training at age six, listening to records from his dad’s collection – Débussy, Wagner, and the dreamy new age music of Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider. He got into fantasy and role-play game soundtracks as well, like Age of Empires and The Elder Scrolls.
As a teen, Andy got heavily involved with the black metal scene, soon gravitating towards the more atmospheric and ambient side of the genre – bands like Burzum, Ulver, and Swiss one-man lo-fi project Paysage d’Hiver.
“I got kicked out of school when I was 14, around the same time I started making music”, he recounts. On cracked music software he got from his drum teacher, he created sounds that landed “somewhere between atmospheric black metal, dungeon synth and symphonic ambient”.
When he turned 18, Andy turned his back on the metal world and his early music project, took a break for a year and then pivoted towards more ambient- and folk-based sounds.
Around that time Andy met a harp builder at a music fair. Although he’d never planned to play harp, he enrolled in a course and then built the Celtic harp he is still playing today.
He never took lessons on the instrument. “I started writing music by imitating guitar picking patterns”, he says. A fan of American primitive guitarists like Robbie Basho, he thinks of his own approach as primitive harp: “My music is a conscious step back to the intuitive.”
Moving to Berlin in his early 20s, he immersed himself in the city’s rich music scene, and despite his lone wolf mentality, he made many musician friends.
As part of a neoclassical group, Andy slowly sharpened his harp technique and style. But the bands he played in had a tendency to fall apart. To gain stability and control over his artistic output, he started a solo project four years ago.
His first album Chapel was released in 2021, with Andy on harp and voice.
“I’m not a singer”, he asserts. “As a child I had a lisp, so I wasn’t even comfortable with speaking much. Singing on stage felt unimaginable to me. Before Chapel, I always buried my voice in layers of strings, overdubs and ambience. I was very insecure.”
Taking inspiration from Nick Drake and his iconic album Pink Moon, Andy decided to record harp and voice live in one take.
“I had to overcome these psychological issues. I learned it was not so much about hitting the note correctly – it was about accepting myself and letting go.”
On many levels, his first solo album marked both a breakthrough and a liberation.
Feeling that his music empowered him spiritually, commercial aspirations faded into the background. Still, feedback on the album turned out to be extremely positive. Andy gained confidence.
“I still like listening to the album, because I am hearing my actual self. It has a very special energy.” Andy often uses words like ‘energy’ and ‘frequency’.
In the three years since then, he’s released two EPs, worked as a session musician, played concerts and written his new and second album, Golla Gorroppu.
The inspiration came to him in the mountains of Sardinia, where Andy and his then-girlfriend were stranded for six months during Covid.
“We lived at an abandoned farm in the mountains”, he tells me. “All of our jobs had been canceled, and then lockdown came. There was no Covid on Sardinia though – we were allowed to move freely, so we decided to stay.”
Spending the winter in the Mediterranean, Andy rediscovered his love for the rugged, scant landscape. In his youth in Bavaria, he’d been an avid mountaineer. “I missed that frequency”, he says with a soft Bavarian accent, rolling the ‘r’ slightly.
Back in Berlin, still dreaming of Sardinia’s Gorropu mountains, the title for his upcoming album appeared in his head: Golla Gorroppu could be translated to ‘The Throat of the Mountain’. It’s not Italian though. Andy made the words up by changing the spelling.
The man across the table seems to have arrived at a comfortable place – a minimalist, an experimentalist, a spiritual seeker, and a wanderer between musical scenes.
He tells me he played in an esoteric tabletop game shop during Berlin’s famous open-air event Fète de la Musique, and supported neoclassical giant Lubomyr Melnyk at an evangelical church just a few weeks later.
“I am my own genre right now”, he boasts confidently.
The next day, I am sitting in an old cemetery chapel in Kreuzberg, listening to Andy Aquarius playing his self-built Celtic harp, wearing a medieval coif.
It’s a Saturday afternoon in March. It has rained earlier, but now the sun is shining through the parted clouds. There’s birdsong and slight wind noises from outside mixing in with the plucked harp tones and Andy’s gentle humming.
I am reminded of Brian Eno’s story, but I am not lying in a hospital bed. I’m sitting on a wooden chair in a chapel. Still, the music is unabashedly gorgeous.
After a few songs, one of Andy’s friends – he tells me later that she holds an actual priest license from Las Vegas – says a few beautiful words and then baptizes his new album, which will be released on Friday, with incense and holy water. Andy throws the vinyl record into the audience and a woman right behind me fetches it perfectly, holding it up in a victory pose.
There’s just 30 people present at this ceremony, most of which seem to be friends and fellow musicians. Some have played on the album.
The day before, after the interview, Andy and I had chatted another hour about our views on the decline of Western society, and our shared beliefs in slowing down, going off-grid, and living a more analogue, rooted life. Just when we were about to depart, Andy spontaneously invited me to this small private event.
Leaving the cemetery and walking through the cold but sunny Kreuzberg afternoon on the hunt for something to eat, I feel thankful to have been allowed at the ceremony, among this fabulous bunch of beautiful creative souls.
Media Diet
Listening: ML Buch, Suntub (2023)
Danish producer, composer, guitarist and singer Marie-Louise Buch writes most of her shoegazey dream-pop fragments on the backseat of her old Peugeot SUV. I’m admittedly late on this, but this album is a universe of its own. Don’t sleep.
Reading: Alvin Lucier, Eight Lectures on Experimental Music (2017)
An anthology of university lectures held between 1989 and 2002 by experimental composers and sound artists Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. This collection feels very accessible even for non-musicians like myself.
Concerts
Acousmonium / INA grm – Groupe de Recherches Musicales
(Berlin, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, 15.03.24)
On the opening night of this year’s Maerzmusik festival, the venerable GRM brought their Acousmonium to the stage – an ‘orchestra’ of more than 60 speakers, designed to play electroacoustic music in a truly immersive way. The ten pieces were specifically written for this set-up, from 1960s/70s compositions by Beatriz Ferreyra, Luc Ferrari and Iannis Xenakis to brand new commissioned works by KMRU and Jim O’Rourke. With some of the living composers present, this was the perfect way of setting off a festival about new music and contemporary composition.
b-l duo / Black Page Orchestra
(Berlin, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, 16.03.24)
The Singaporean duo of Bertram Wee and Lynette Yeo took the side stage at Maerzmusik, setting out to play ‘the creepiest, craziest music’ on keyboards, toy pianos and a talkbox. Performing Wee’s own compositions and arrangements, as well as pieces by Alex Paxton, Joan Tan, Sarah Nemtsov and Enno Poppe, they tore down barriers between art music and noise music, physically and intellectually challenging their audience. This is how it’s done.
Black Page Orchestra, a Vienna-based ensemble for new music, performed a set including two compositions by founding members of the orchestra (Mirela Ivičević and Matthias Kranebitter), as well as pieces by Alexander Kubeev, Jung An Tagen and Sarah Nemtsov. Their programme Pulp Science featured weird custom-built instruments, atonal violin blasts and heavy flute attacks, and peaked with a piece on an alternate pitch system going from the heart chakra and a mosquito alarm to frequencies beneath the hearing range of adults. Truly inspiring.
Steve Reich Six Pianos & Terry Riley Keyboards Study #2
(Berliner Philharmonie, 18.03.24)
After the radicalism of Maerzmusik’s opening weekend, a night of classic Minimal Music almost felt like smooth elevator muzak. Six pianists – Gregor Schwellenbach, John Kameel Farah, Benedikt Ter Braak, Daniel Brandt, Paul Frick and Kai Schumacher – perfomed two formative pieces of Minimalism, written in 1965 and 1973. While Riley’s earlier composition follows a loose structure with much room for exploration, Reich’s is based on a meticulously noted score of phasing patterns.
The performance received standing ovations, which proved how the Minimal aesthetic has infiltrated today’s listening standards. I loved the Reich and enjoyed the Riley. The first part before that, a set of their own compositions and arrangements, I wasn’t too crazy about. Also, the concert’s lack of gender inclusivity baffled me. So they couldn’t let a single woman play piano with the dudes? Come on! It’s 2024. Make some room for other voices on stage too, goddamnit.
© 2024 Stephan Kunze
Funny! I'm friends with Andy 🥰 It's great to see him here. I love his music; it's so mesmerizing. Are you by any chance living in Berlin? I'm organising a second Substack writers meet-up in May https://lu.ma/ppfdddzk
Great stuff! Thanks for the discovery, I love it!