I’ve been a big fan of the work of Swiss/Bernese musician and producer Leoni Leoni for some time. It’s a few years since we featured her work, but Bongo Joe Records catapulted Leoni back on our radar with an upcoming vinyl collection that captures the best tracks from her four cassette releases.
Salami Rose Joe Louis is a favourite of ours, and if you dig the Bay Area-based musician, this is an artist you have to check out. Just as quirky and with that DIY bedroom spirit, her music is slightly distorted but still has meticulous attention to detail, and the result is just lovely.
Her recording process is always off the cuff, usually starting by fooling around with an instrument until she finds a sound she loves (“could be a percussive element, chords or a mood created with samples”). Leoni will create many projects and ideas on tape or a computer over months until they begin to come together into one cohesive idea.
“I think it’s interesting to hear songs from all 4 cassettes on one album,” explains Leoni, “You hear the sound developing from a phase where I recorded everything through a super noisy leslie speaker and I didn’t care if the washing machine was running during the recordings (yes, my studio is also the laundry room of my house) to a phase of insomnia where I only recorded at night [Easy Sleep – 2020], to the tidy and a bit square recordings of Drum Problems [2021] and back to the minimalist synth songs of Yellow and Why {2021] which i recorded next to smoking weed and watching cartoons in a very sad month of February.”
Having almost quit music three years ago, we’re happy to have Leoni Leoni back and are looking forward to her cooking up a rich stew of unconventional and unique sounds.
Leoni Leoni Tracklisting:
1. Figged si sich Frau Schluchter
2. Easyjet
3. Easy
4. Weed + Cartoons
5. I’m out of this 1
6. Langsam Müed
7. We’re dying, my Friend
8. A day without Headaches
9. Schöni Frau
10. Herbst im Dschungel
11. Leo’s Jazz
12. Sugar, fruit, silence, speed
13. If there is Magic it is made in your Womb
14. Yellow + White
