„My golden circus girls all sailed away...“ Summer Rain.
In 1947 at the age of 19, with a symbolic gesture Yves Klein signed his name in the sky over Nice. It wasn't an act of megalomania, it was the artistic expression for the appopriation of the universe. But megalomaniac or artist, who can tell the difference. Fact is there was no resistance. No move in the solid skies, no gleaming metal out of the breathtaking blue. God had left us long ago for a brandnew universe. He had left us alone with all our contradictional talents: love and hate, foolishness and cleverness, creativity and lust for destruction. And what he left was a perfect blue sky, and a man with the composite name of two famous fashion designers was the first to set foot into this godforsaken emptiness.
Years later in 1960, Klein proclaimed his "saut dans le vide" (leap into the void) by a photomontage, which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Now, big deeds are easy to follow. One giant leap we had already taken up to this weird moon of stardom, bare of the gods we expected to find. Now we were about to write our third album that could only be another masterpiece of ours, though we knew we weren't ready to do it. But it had to be. The jump into the void.
We composed songs as if we would timber the planks for a raft to carry us across this ocean of uncertainty. Then out of the blue something wondrous happened. For me it came about when we wrote Summer Rain. All at once a center arose from our desperate endevours and everything else started to circle around it. The circle became a bubble. The bubble carried us into the void. Into it, not across. Depth, not surface. It just happened because we dared to jump. And it was not because we were heroes. There was simply no other choice. We had started the show without reading the plot, now we were part of it. Maybe exactly that is the conundrum of almost every of our albums. They are spectacles wherein the actors perform without knowing the plot. But there is a plot. There must be.
In his famous photomontage from 1960, Klein flew towards the pavement but he never hit the ground. Instead he died two years later at the age of 34 following a heart attack. One could speculate, he changed for another universe. Like God in "Summer Rain" or at that bright blue day in 1947.
Isn't it that we always follow a god? And though many people claim they had found it, it doesn't seem to help very much concerning the sad affairs of the world. Maybe because gods are exclusively responsible for the ever next chamber, the ever next space, the ever next possibility. Following them is a race against the improbability of likelihood. Or vice versa.
The protagonist in Summer Rain waits for the end of the world. He does not understand that his waiting conditions the end of the world. He thinks the end of the world is something that must happen. But no, it happens because nothing happens anymore. It happens by his refusal to jump into the next void. Endlessly he will wait without knowing that the end is here since long.
At the time we were working on our third album I saw one of Kleins paintings in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. A canvas painted in perfect blue. The name of the colour is IKB, PB29, CI 77007, patent-registered by Yves Klein. It was exactly that breathtaking blue as I imagined it in our song. I was 34 then and my life had just begun. And then we jumped...
Marian Gold, October 2020
ALPHAVILLE - BEST OF 40 YEARS TOUR
Tickets: www.alphaville.earth/#liveshows
KEMPTEN - 02.11.2024
ZÜRICH - 03.11.2024
BREMEN - 16.11.2024
LÜNEBURG - 17.11.2024
LINGEN - 29.11.2024
WETZLAR - 30.11.2024
NÜRNBERG - 10.12.2024
PFORZHEIM - 11.12.2024
KIEL - 23.01.2025
HANNOVER - 24.01.2025
DÜSSELDORF - 06.02.2025
BOCHUM - 07.02.2025
BERLIN - 13.02.2025
HAMBURG - 14.02.2025
WIEN - 22.02.2025
FREIBURG - 01.03.2025
FRANKFURT AM MAIN - 02.03.2025
MANNHEIM - 08.03.2025
BIELEFELD - 09.03.2025
MAGDEBURG - 17.03.2025
STUTTGART - 14.04.2025
SAARBRÜCKEN - 15.04.2025
LEIPZIG - 29.04.2025
DRESDEN - 30.04.2025
MÜNCHEN - 27.05.2025
More Liveshows:
-MÜNCHEN - 23.06.2024
BAD ELSTER - 28.06.2024
FRANKFURT ODER - 13.07.2024
CALW - 29.07.2024
BAD FÜSSING - 01.08.2024
MALLORCA - 10.08.2024
STOCKHOLM - 15.08.2024
ALZEY - 17.08.2024
DINSLAKEN - 18.08.2024
WEIßENFELS - 23.08.2024
KASSEL - 25.08.2024
USTI NAD LABEM - 31.08.2024
CLUJ-NAPOCA - 21.09.2024
BUDAPEST - 12.10.2024
FREIBURG - 09.11.2024
PRAG - 14.11.2024
MADRID - 26.04.2025
FINKENSTEIN - 23.08.2025
Tickets: www.alphaville.earth/#liveshows
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