Sarah Neumann’s debut EP as Atka has been a long time coming. Raised in East Germany and now split between living in London and Berlin, the 25-year-old musician has dedicated most of her adult life to studying philosophy, coloring her atmospheric synth-pop a particularly dense shade of existential. Of “Desiring Machines,” her Deleuze- and Guattaris-inspired first single from the forthcoming Eye Against the Ashen Sky EP, she shares: “It’s the first thing I am putting out ever after hiding in academia for the past six years and it’s freaking five minutes long, so I guess there’s been a whole lot I’ve been waiting to say.”
Penned while working on her master thesis last summer, the track plays out like a gently building Florence + the Machine ballad crafted by the heartland-rock and post-punk proclivities of Gang of Youths—whose guitarist Jung Kim produced the track. “I found myself increasingly outside-determined by the gaze of others,” Neumann shares, invoking the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. “I started to lose touch of where I begin and this collective ‘other’ starts, and wanted to create a soundscape that explores this relentless growing into everywhere, everything, and everyone. It’s the affirmative desire to break away from particularly the male gaze and an embrace of the uncertainty of self-affirmation that comes afterwards.”
The self-directed video for the track places Atka within the open-space locales of her childhood spent in East Germany, “where you can basically see the world bend,” she continues. “It’s a landscape that is actually quite magical in its mysticism but carries a lot of heavy feelings and memories for me—I guess that’s what makes folklore and mythology so appealing. It’s a lot about coming to terms with that dichotomy, if it even is one.”
Check out the video below.
