Music Existence Because of Music, We Exist
With nonchalant beats and elements that at times recall James Blake, Childish Gambino and Frank Ocean, ‘Favours’ boasts delicacy and astonishing depth. As well as that, Inner Tongue combines the lightness of touch that distinguishes Death Cab For Cutie, the heartfelt perfection found in Sohn’s sonic realms, and the intuition evident in Chet Faker. Artists including Mercury Prize nominated Ghostpoet, Everything Everything and German wunderkind Get Well Soon have invited Inner Tongue to support them on European tours.
The story behind ‘Favours’, and the reason it sounds the way it does, is a remarkable one. In 2013 Inner Tongue was diagnosed with a rare vocal-cord disorder so severe that only a handful of specialists throughout the entire world were capable of treating it. The resulting surgery left him, for a time, unable to talk. The months that followed his operation were emotionally and physically shattering, but he eventually began composing again. Singing was out of the question, “so I decided to modify my musical focus temporarily by writing songs which could produce a melodic tension without vocals, but which featured the traits of forward-looking pop music. It was as if someone had pressed a reset button on the musical identity I had of myself.”
‘Teeth’ is an eccentric pop ballad with a clear precedence of emotions over structures. About the song, Inner Tongue says: “Have you ever had a brief moment of clarity that lets you see things from a different perspective? When that vision has slipped away, all that’s left is a feeling. I was chasing to reproduce one such feeling with this.”
‘Teeth’s mesmerizing animated video was created by Vienna-based designer/director Patrick Sturm and is showing a “Nichts für niemanden” (nothing for nobody) award deconstructing itself over the course of the song. It has a very personal source of inspiration. “My mentor Joerg Schlick (MoMA, musée d’art moderne et contemporain), who passed in 2005, was part of the Lord Jim Loge collective. I wanted to honour his work by incorporating my own take on their mantra ‘Keiner hilft keinem'” (nobody helps nobody,)” Sturm says. He founded his creative interdisciplinary studio Eat My Dear in 2005, and since then he has worked on projects for various national and international clients as well as for movies such as ‘Independence Day Resurgence’.
