There is an imaginary line that connects the tropical aesthetic of McArthur Park in Los Angeles and the neo-Romanesque of the Zwölf-Apostel-Kirche (literally “Church of the Twelfth Apostles”) located in Berlin's Schöneberg neighborhood. Two spaces diametrically opposed in concept and history, but which in some way inspired the nine tracks of “McArthur”, the first album by the duo composed of the German composer and singer FRANKIE, born Franziska Aigner, and the Dominican-American DJ and producer Kelman Duran, someone who, among other things, contributed significantly to Beyoncé's “Renaissance”, specifically in the songs “I'm That Girl” and “HEATED”, as well as the music from the film “Rodeo” by Lola Quivoron. The two met in 2022 within the walls of the German evangelical cathedral and gradually embarked on a damned singular path, inaugurated in “prayer” and continued with a fruitful exchange of scores and sketches, through new meetings both in Athens and in Los Angeles.
However, “McArthur” was born from something deeper, that is, from a search for the self in what Duran tends to define as a “negative space”, within which perhaps to envelop jazz improvisations and offal from machines in key from time to time. deconstructed clubas the elusive “SLINKY” clearly shows, with cicadas, piano melodies and a children's choir that would have appealed to Kubrick, before the trumpet of Alex Zhang Hungtai of the Dirty Beaches overwhelms the rest.
Cursed fire and holy water: in “McArthur” many opposing elements coexist. “BWV 639” is in fact a reworking of a Bach cantata, played for the occasion by pianist Iris Moldiz, who recorded her part at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. It's a ghostly ballad sung by a kind of possessed angel while he watches his own helplessly big crunch inner. And again Aigner's cello in ecclesiastical attire that marries burning percussion in “Techno 127 BPM” or the introductory (and twin) “GRAYT”, whose accompanying video, created in collaboration with Enad Marouf and Margarita Maximova, revolves around off-putting choreography complete with scenery lo-fi from frame.
“We are on a journey towards something, yet we choose not to arrive”: it is the concepta bit Kerouac and a bit Proust, narrative and thematic of an album in which the initial approach to the sacred is continually profaned.
Therefore, dissonances and stasis. There is indeed a calm chaos, to quote Veronesi, which reigns supreme here and there, even when, as in “Medicine”, the only purpose is banally to narrate the end of a long relationship, recalled as an exorcism, for a song produced by Duran in the Warp Studio, which overlooks, coincidentally, McArthur Park.
With “McArthur” FRANKIE & Kelman Duran give life to a surreal dance, in which experimental electronics and free jazz inserts collide like protons along that fateful stretch, exposed in attack, which metaphorically links the Berlin church and the Los Angeles park. In between, emotional gray areas and religious impulses, teasing demons and saints in one of the most intriguing debuts of the beginning of the year.
02/01/2026
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
