Helfenstein, Remo
Spite
Meeting vulnerability with persistence, Lucerne-based musician Remo Helfenstein presents Spite, his first solo album on Präsens Editionen. Whereas his 2022 debut EP, Comforting Katharina, traced raw, devotional impulses, Spite expands the terrainbalancing psychedelic drift with sudden moments of clarity, wounded grandeur with flashes of pop transcendence. The record thrives on contradiction: oscillating between the no wave austerity of Suicide and the meditative (and dadaist) expanses of Bitchin Bajas and Bonnie "Prince" Billy's collaborative work, while opening into passages of gospel-infused spaciousness. At times intimate and porous, at times expansive and ecstatic, Helfenstein shapes a sound world that fuses analog and digital processesboth deeply personal and insistently collective. This duality comes to life most strikingly in recordings with fellow musicians Klara Germanier (background vocals and guitar), Raphael Loher (keys), Manuel Troller (guitar), and Olivier Vogel (bass), featured in various constellations across all seven tracks. Spite is not devotional music, but devotion itself: unyielding, uncompromising, vital. It insists on its own necessitycreated because it had to be.