Summer Special: RUFEN UND RAUSHAUN – Music videos for YANEQ screening + concert

One year after the record release of YANEQ’s album RUFEN UND RAUSHAUN, produced by Grzegorzki Records, the label of the artists Alicja Kwade and Gregor Hildebrandt, Videoart at Midnight now shows the music videos that were created for the record in a big gala revue with all contributors: artist friends with whom Jan Kage (aka YANEQ) has collaborated in his art spaces Schau Fenster and KanyaKage or partied at the legendary Party Arty nights in Kreuzberg. All videos for the individual tracks of the album were produced in a somehow typically Berlin spirit – low budget, with idealism, creative enthusiasm and friendship.

With videos by: Lilli Berger, Anina Brisolla, Jan Brokof, Nils Corte, Peter Domsch, Wolf Hogekamp, Paul Arne Meyer, Winson, Zé & Kathleen and Benja Sachau.

Through the program leads the wonderful Patrick Khatami (known from film and television).

And afterwards YANEQ rocks the microphone playing pieces of his album live together with System Trippner on Drums, Bass and Keys.

Album info:
It took the lockdown to get the music flowing out of YANEQ again. RUFEN UND RAUSHAUN (shouting and banging out) is his first album in almost fifteen years. True, the Berlin rapper has been making music on and off since the release of the critically acclaimed hip-hop-electro hybrid WIDERSPRÜCHE (2006), for example together with Jammin Unit in the formation Mutfak Drt. With these projects, however, mainly the clubs were rocked live.

Exhibiting visual arts had kept the all-rounder away from writing lyrics, composing and publishing. The club series Party Arty and the art space Schau Fenster, in which he brought together creatives from a wide variety of backgrounds, had taken up YANEQ’s time to an extent that at some point left no room for serious music-making and lyrics. “Corona closed the gallery, now I’m making music again / where it all leads, no plan, I’m just drifting and looking,” he rhymes in the up-beat song “Y to Q.”

Isolated in the Brandenburg dacha and thus freed from everyday life, YANEQ began at the end of 2020 to record grooves on drums and piano and to rap rhymes over them. In this way, more and more pieces came together in nightly sessions. The principle: play everything yourself à la Stevie Wonder and combine endless rhyme associations in the style of MF Doom in secluded pampas. The beats limp, the grooves hang and yet are round in the end. Ben Lauber from Transporterraum Berlin then worked with these layouts. He edited, arranged, tuned an instrument that needed tuning or straightened a snare that was too off-key. And he played in further elements here and there, a brass section, a string section. This always with the sensitivity not to grind down or smooth out the raw and always own charm of the recordings. T.Raumschmiere and his son QSeng are the featured artists on “Auf in die Zukunft”, for whose video, among others, the artist Jonathan Meese and his mother Brigitte have been enlisted. Chérie from Warren Suicide sings on “Halb Voll” and YANEQ’s family on “Südlich von Eden.” Mo Delgado plays a virtuoso sax solo on the title track.

RUFEN UND RAUSHAUN are “analog-rattling, jazz-grounded hip-hop beats paired with German lyrics so good you’ll want to read them as a book of poetry.” (Max Dax). In terms of aesthetics, this hip-hop is somewhere between Krautrock, indie aesthetics and underground rap of the 90s. But these are only comparisons. Somehow it’s all very peculiar too, very now and very pop.

RUFEN UND RAUSHAUN was released in June 2022 on Grzegrozki Records, the label of artists Alicja Kwade and Gregor Hildebrandt.

Kristof Schreuf:
“This Gil Scott-Heron of Kreuzberg doesn’t have to clean gates of perception to find out that, say, a wordflow can be infinite. For Yaneq simply kicks down those gates.”

Jan Joswig:
“Hip-hop as a martial arts discipline is certainly not Yaneq’s idea of a good time. Let the others struggle in the aggro loop. He’d rather throw on his housecoat and play a game of croquet in the backyard. Ghetto King? CountryBobo!”

Max Dax:
“Out of nowhere, Yaneq gives us analog-rattling, jazz-primed hip-hop beats paired with German lyrics so good you want to read them as a book of poetry. Beyond misogyny, does German hip-hop have a lyrical future after all? It seems so, and that amounts to a long-awaited sensation.”

Videoart at Midnight in cooperation with YANEQ, das Arty and Grzegorzki Records.