Sara Käser & Natalie Peters – Monde Kreisen (selftape records, 2025)

23/10/2025 – by Vasco Viviani (Source)

Patchouli. A laugh, and off we go — with the strings of the cello and the vocal cords climbing, rubbing against each other, releasing strange, twitching sounds. Sara Käser and Natalie Peters embark on a daring escapade through the fifteen tracks that make up Monde Kreisen.

I know Natalie well — I produced a live concert of hers with Sebi Tramontana, and organized an artist residency with Laure Federiconi. Sara Käser, on the other hand, is new to me, though I absolutely adore her chosen instrument. She plays it courageously, never afraid to leave Peters’ voice exposed, unsupported — as if challenging herself on ever steeper ground.

Natalie, for her part, has no fear of transforming her voice into raw exertion, into muscular contraction — entering into a brutal, almost bestial dialogue with the cello’s rough sound. It’s the kind of conversation any possessed spirit would dream of, as in Ebbe flutet / Blauschwarzgrau.

At times, musicality itself emerges from the most borderline situations. The two musicians are careful not to mire themselves in overly dense tangles, letting their creature — born within the walls of Berlin’s Morphin Raum — breathe freely.

Often one listens to their exchanges with genuine wonder, trying to grasp how such a free spirit can coexist with something so joyfully childlike. And like childhood, it knows no limits — sometimes verging on the grotesque, other times sliding into lucid moments that send shivers down the spine. Yet that is not Käser and Peters’ intent. Their goal is the creation of a language, a resonance, a shared current that bounces and flows through the album’s tracks.

The whistles and sighs in “Worte / Signalhaft gegen den Himmel” make one hold their breath — perhaps for their pacing, or for the sense of trying to speak directly to the animal world, without caricature, as happens in Geblasen / Aus Glas.
At times, the sounds coming from cello and voice evoke not music, but the squeaks and hinges of a silent theatre — as if only the bare minimum were being allowed to pass through. And yet, one feels certain that seeing them perform live would alter the substance entirely. That’s not a small thing, considering this is a demanding improvisational record that still manages to sound listenable, engaging, even intriguing. Its length and scope do not exhaust; they instead allow a full immersion into the material.

Listening to “Und essen uns süsstraubenblau”, one can’t help but wonder: are Sara Käser and Natalie Peters even human? Or are they beings lent to humanity by nature itself, as a way of opening dialogue? After all, those who listen to experimental music are more attuned to perceiving as “intriguing sound” those mixtures that are unusual, dissonant, sometimes even irritating.

Monde kreisen — “the orbit of moons” — might well be a first step toward a heightened attention to what is misunderstood, mysterious, and natural.

They say: When the wise one points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger.
But when musicians speak to the moon, we should listen to both sides — to the processes they set in motion and to what follows.
The best may be yet to come.