PREMIERE - MONA MUR - Snake Island
Press Release by: Dan Volohov - Discipline PR | Thursday 29th September 2022
EXCLUSIVE ACCESS: German Industrial Icon Has Unleashed Snake Island
Mona Mur is a Berlin-based singer, performer, producer and composer, who first graced the music scene during the punk-explosion of the early 80’s and emerged onto an industrial music scene at its nascence in Berlin in the 1980s. Developing their sound alongside other key German figures like Einstürzende Neubauten and KMFDM, Mona Mur’s been creating intricate, moody music that often concerns the relationship between beauty and darkness.
Nearly forty years of recording and performing has produced a rich career that showed many unexpected diversions, from collaborative works with En Esch (KMFDM, PIGFACE) and FM Einheit to Mur’s massive catalogue of scoring work, composing music for video-games, TV and collaborating with filmmakers like Rudolph and Werner Herzog.
Marching in merciless beats and iron guitar riffs’ tempests, after a life of musical vagabondage, Mona Mur has come back to her industrial roots, harder and more sinister than ever before … to Snake Island.
Explaining the origin of the album title, Mona comments: “I came across a story about a small island off the Brazilian shores, where twenty thousand snakes dwell, deadly poisonous vipers. They sleep nine months, then awake, only when a certain species of birds of passage stop by to breed their children, so the snakes can eat them and survive. The snakes are everywhere. They’ve killed three lighthouse keepers so that the lighthouse is abandoned now”. If this story is not true, you would have to invent it. The idea of the record was brought up out of the story. And, as Mona explains: “So that I found myself living on that island, maybe even as one of the snakes”. Being carried away by the total freedom of the imaginative inhabitant island, Mona Mur has experienced a great freedom on Snake Island. A perfect setting to unite ten melancholy doomy, romantic apocalyptic songs (including two cover versions).
With the help of an old friend and a collaborator, Ralf Goldkind, Mona Mur managed to create an expressive record full of mysticism. “Goldkind is an eccentric shaman. My brother in doom!” underlines Mona. “He’s been constantly coming up with the most energetic and original stuff, be it electronic or guitar or bass based.” The collaborators exchanged tracks, making their way to what Mona describes as “the doomiest, heaviest, dark, flowery, romantic, dystopic music channelled into the world”, something that only Mona Mur would compare to a huge painting consisting of sadness, bitter and pain and “having to witness the beautiful blue planet die.”
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