With the sun out and summer around the corner, isn’t it an ideal time to be experiencing soulful, raw and powerful honest music on the streets? How about bringing that into the prestigious Heimathafen? Heimathafen attracts world class music from all corners of the globe, and Alice and her friends’ concert felt like an interactive environment, capable of capturing the same raw feel, vibes and energy from her street performances, but for those unfamiliar with her music prior to the show, it probably exceeded expectations of whatever they had heard leading up to the show.
There is a living spirit in Alice’s music and for people who live in Berlin and have experienced the streets… It’s relatable in many facets.
The concert was popularized mostly by her own will, handing out flyers during her U-Bahn station performances, pasting posters around the city…
It’s difficult to define what was happening on stage because of this exchange between audience and performers. At one point, nearing the end of the concert, before her encore, she got everybody in the venue to sit down. Within seconds, people obliged and like an orchestra with Alice explaining the warm up, half the audience began humming down a soothing vocal scale with the other half going up, surprisingly in tune with her song.
It feels like there is only a short distance setting you apart from Alice
Sure, there is a tendency to pull diverse ranges of music – and in this case dancing as well – into a genre like world music, and this concert did that and exceeded this categorization. Regardless of the nationalities of artists creating this experience on stage, great music is great music.
It feels like there is only a short distance setting you apart from Alice…. After all, she is playing on the street every day where people are walking to and from wherever, going about their daily routine and with the sound of her voice distinctly heard while stepping out of the the U-Bahn, she seems to connect with pretty well anyone walking by. It’s impossible not to stop and acknowledge her raw, pure talent and being.
On stage this shit got tribal.
The set for the evening was typical of what she plays on the street (Red, Rebel Rose, Grey, Berlin Blues, Girl on an Island to name a few) and performed with her friends on stage this shit got tribal. Each song naturally transitioned into the next in a harmonious state of flow. Mixed with a high degree of fan hysteria and people who hadn’t ever heard of her before, the concert resulted in an atmosphere of some fans singing along to all her words and screaming how much they love her, to the new fans standing in still, blissfully in awe of what was in front of them.
Review by Duncan Anderson.
