Jammerzine has an exclusive interview with the artist known as Henny Herz. With her new album ‘Two Colors to Combine’ releasing on February 17 and her new video ‘sugar+oxygen’ just released (watch below), we get an exclusive glimpse of an artist that not only knows how to craft her sound and vision within her music but already has the varied history that gives one a glimpse of how that sound came to be.
And what a sound it is. Deep and lucid and, on some levels, almost world building. An immersion, if you will.
And, in this interview, we talk with Henny about that sound and the recording process of ‘Two Colors to Combine’ and much, much more. Enjoy!
About Henny Herz
Munich-born Henny Herz made her debut in 2017 with One Day One Room, a 23-minute video EP produced by Munich’s Hauskonzerte. The same year, she traveled for 6 months through Australia and the U.S. and played concerts in Melbourne, New Orleans, New York, and other cities.
She collaborated with different musicians like Laura Fisher and George Elizondo, and was invited to take part in the “Unknown Tour” project, for which a film production team from L.A. traveled throughout North America for 10 weeks in a huge RV with a built-in studio. Henny joined them on their route from New Orleans to New York. Their mission was to find unknown musicians of various genres, record them, and let musicians from other places play along with these recordings, eventually generating an album. A documentary on this journey was released on iTunes in November of 2019.
Back in Germany, Henny Herz wrote and produced her first full-length record, Back into Space, released in October 2019 on Millaphon. On the album, she filtered different spaces and different voices within herself through various influences—folk, soul, and jazz—and languages—English, German, and French.
In 2018, she moved to Mannheim, where she completed a master’s degree in popular music at Popakademie Baden-Württemberg. As her final project, she processed her parents’ escape from the GDR musically on a seven-track EP called I was born here because my parents have fled.
During the lockdowns, she wrote for her second album, Two Colors to Combine, while on an inspiring hiatus at the Baltic Sea. The album was recorded with her band (Nicholas Stampf, drums; Tobias Schmitt, bass; Lukas Klotzbach, guitars) and producer Maximilian Woerle in Obergriesbach, a small village in Bavaria, in late summer of 2021. It will be released in February 2023 via record Jet as well as in a limited edition of 100 colored vinyl records.
For one of the singles, “Sugar+Oxygen,” she produced a music video with the Heidelberg film team DNA Creative Collective, for which she developed the concept and choreography herself, executing it with the Swedish-Ghanaian dancer Amie Jammeh. Another music video was created with the Mannheim artist Tabea Lankhuijzen, who drew a “one-line” painting on a 2 x 2 meter canvas. It was captured in one take, just like the accompanying song, “Constant Flow.”
The band will be touring together throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for some dates in November and at the end of February when the new album is released. Henny Herz is currently spending some months in Montreal working on new music and taking her first steps into the diverse, inspiring music scene of the city.
LINKS:
https://www.hennyherz.com
https://www.facebook.com/hennyherz
https://www.instagram.com/henny_herz
https://www.youtube.com/hennyherz
https://www.hennyherz.bandcamp.com