Alwa Glebe (lyrics)

Artist's website

Artist's website at MySpace

Alwa Glebe, the German "dark chanteuse"

Pain is a leitmotiv in many of Alwa Glebe's lyrics to her songs, imbuing the programmatic track "In pain" (in German, "Im Schmerz") from her second CD album Will-o'-the-wisps. She wrote: "The melancholic aspect of the pain is worked up in my music by giving voice to 'the beast', as I fondly call the pain. The song 'In pain' is definitely programmatic of the wish to express this feeling musically: its chronic manifestation prevailing within me. The constant repetition of the question 'why?' reflects the pointlessness of it all. Even the deepest insight into migraine does not change the fact that it will stay." The "'Im Schmerz' track turned me into pieces!", one critic noted (Atomei, 2006), providing testimony of the song's effectiveness in conveying the Stimmung of the world in pain.

In her second CD album Will-o'-the-wisps, one critic wrote, "Alwa Glebe possesses the voice of an apparition" (Wozny, 2006). Her vocal performance gives a proper reflection of another leitmotiv that runs through several songs of her creation, viz. the idea of instability of reality in a world of "illusion", an idea obviously inspired (besides literary sources) by the artist's early migraine aura experiences of feeling "distant" to herself and her environment, and her "eyes' deceptions", i.e. her subjective visual sensations of migraine aura (Gowers, 1895). According to an interview statement from novelist and fellow migraineur Siri Hustvedt, the "idea of visual instability is... philosophical, but certainly someone who suffers from this might be more inclined to have that kind of view of the world - that we don't always know what we're looking at. How do we read the world? How do we interpret it?" (Hodson, 2003)

Mirroring her visual aura experiences of seeing sparkles or lights akin to light reflexions or tiny stars, the title track of Alwa Glebe's second album Will-o'-the-wisps has, according to the artist, "also this 'character of lights', exemplified by the glittering, sparkling atmosphere and the title, which introduces into the mood."

References

Atomei, D. (2006). Review of Alwa Glebe's "debüt". KOGAIONON Underground Magazine, Romania, August 2006. KOGAIONON website. Accessed on May 10, 2008, here.
Gowers, W.R. (1895). Subjective visual sensations. Trans. Ophthalmol. Soc. UK 15: 1-38.
Hodson, H. (2003). Darkness and light. The Telegraph, November 1, 2003. The Telegraph newspaper website. Accessed on May 10, 2008, here.
Podoll K. Alwa Glebe's imitatio Nietzsche: On elective affinities of migraine-inspired artists. In: Rose FC (ed) The Neurology of Music. Academic Press, London 2008 (in press)
Wozny, M. (2006). Critique of Alwa Glebe's CD album "Irrlichter". VIRUS! Magazine, New York, January 29, 2006. Alwa Glebe's website. Accessed on May 10, 2008, here.

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