FM4 Soundpark is a web platform, community, and radio show for and with Austrian musicians. In an ongoing collaboration, FM4’s team recommends particular artists of the moment to amplify. Today, the honor goes to: UCHE YARA and her debut album: “BODYSCANNER”.
“I wrote the album with my body before my mind even knew what was happening.”
UCHE YARA is one of Austria’s most promising musicians, and her debut album BODYSCANNER takes an electrifying new direction. Some albums are bursts of inspiration in which the body marvels at what the mind creates in a state of flow. For UCHE YARA, it was the other way around: matter over mind. The songs seemed to crackle out of her like sparks. “Even while I was creating them, the songs propelled me into a state that I couldn’t control with my mind,” she explains. “I wrote the album with my body before my mind even knew what was happening.” While her previous EPs floated somewhere between rock and R&B, BODYSCANNER belongs unmistakably in the club. Born and raised in Upper Austria, UCHE YARA began her musical journey with marimba, percussion and all kinds of other sound-making objects before picking up the electric guitar. She went from standing in the front row as a die-hard Bilderbuch fan to eventually joining the band onstage as part of their live lineup. Her instinct for rhythm and unconventional sounds also paved the way for her work as a producer. Having lived in Berlin for several years, she has absorbed the fast-paced energy of Europe’s clubbing capital, which has clearly left its mark on the album’s sound.
She produced BODYSCANNER almost entirely herself, mostly working on her laptop between tour dates rather than in a studio. Whenever a gap opened up in her schedule, she returned to fragments, ideas and demos, some of them several years old, curating and reassembling existing material while repeatedly sampling herself and her own voice. The result is an electronic, unconventional and densely layered album, as tightly packed as a club at peak time. Its tracks are a tangled web of audio layers, effects and guitars that repeatedly burst to the surface. Compared to her earlier work, the guitar is less prominent, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has disappeared: in many cases, it has simply become harder to identify amid the processing and electronic textures. Conversely, sounds that initially seem to be heavily distorted guitars sometimes turn out to be UCHE YARA’s own voice. At the very beginning of the title track, for example, she imitates powerful organ sounds with her voice, almost like a warning signal of the sonic surprises to come. Rather than taking centre stage as a conventional lead vocal, her voice becomes part of the album’s architecture: its framework, its foundation and even its finishing layer.
BODYSCANNER is not so much an invitation to dance as an impulsive command to get off your ass and move. Its tracks seem to fire electrical impulses directly into unexplored regions of the brain, pulling movement out of the listener almost involuntarily. UCHE YARA herself became aware of this physical force while creating the album. The new, considerably more body-driven sound also helped her reconcile with dancing as a form of self-expression. For a long time, the pressure to perform and the feeling of constantly being watched, assessed and scanned in clubs had created barriers between her and the dancefloor. It was the sense of togetherness and community she experienced in Berlin’s queer club spaces that gradually began to break those barriers down. In these environments, dancing became less about how she appeared to others and more about the pleasure of movement itself. And when she sat in front of her laptop working on the album, those barriers finally disappeared altogether. The creative process allowed her to reconnect with dance as a state of freedom, enjoyment and physical expression. “For me, dancing is a state of pleasure that you can take even further through movement,” she explains. Full of pulsating beats, atmospheric textures, intricate rhythms and unexpected sonic twists, BODYSCANNER translates that experience into sound. Few contemporary Austrian albums are better suited to losing yourself on the dancefloor than UCHE YARA’s electrifying debut.
Translated and abridged by Arianna Alfreds from the German original by René Froschmayer.