Mountain lake folk, delicatessen singer-songwriters & cultural walks
Mountain lake folk with a view over the city. We sit at the kitchen table with Flavian Graber and listen. Raw, authentic and unfiltered, the 39-year-old father of three talks about his journey, encounters and observations along the way of everyday life. Accompanied by acoustic guitar and piano, Graber paints pictures with his songs that allow you to immerse yourself and come to rest. Space, silence and the other person: these are the ingredients of the Swiss delicatessen singer-songwriter and 2024 Culture Prize winner.
With his band We Invented Paris, Flavian Graber has played over 500 concerts in Europe and the country's major festival stages. After twelve years of English-language indie pop, five studio albums and placements in various films, TV appearances and radio airplay, he now sings in his dialect in Swiss German.
Graber is also literally breaking new ground at concerts: Inspired by the circumstances of the pandemic, Flavian Graber developed the hiking concerts, in which concert guests set off with him for two hours to listen to nature and music. Walking and pausing with a view and the right soundtrack. Get out, slow down and be inspired: A new form of cultural walk. A similarly unusual idea: presenting the songs in private kitchens, inviting strangers and friends, offering more than just a concert.
In the trio, Flavian Graber plays with Simon Spiess, who creates a tapestry of sound with saxophone and sound modulation devices and wraps himself around the songs like a garment. With Konstantin König on drums and at the same time with his left hand on the synth bass, the trio creates picturesque images that flood the room.
Flavian Graber, that is music of the moment. This concept should also apply to the recordings. And so the arrangements were created at the moment they were recorded. This freshness, when a new song is played on tape for the first time, combined with the tension that every note can be final, leads to a unique intensity in the room. The deliberate omission of possibilities creates space for the essentials. And often the feeling arises that the silence plays along like an additional instrument.
