Blending the folklore of her native village in the woods of Brandenburg with the industrial, electronic sounds of London and Berlin, Atka makes powerful, intellectually-driven art-pop. On new track ‘Lenny’, Atka offers “This is a song about how one man’s obsession with finding meaning turns everything around him into a swamp of meaninglessness that also sucks in everyone around him. It’s witnessing empty repetition right in front of your eyes and the helplessness, all-limbs-dropping-to-the-floor exhaustion felt as a result, when caring for someone who is depressed. And ultimately it’s about the absence of being perceived by that person and one’s drift into a ghost-like state. When no one is watching or sees me – do I even exist? ‘Lenny’ is about “reverse-paranoia” if you want it.”

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The single ‘Desiring Machines’, a reference to the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s books Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, explores how one’s own body is experienced as an object under the (male) gaze. Here Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome is explored musically with a soundscape that grows and grows like the root-system that the two philosophers describe. A rhizome does not start from anywhere or end anywhere; it grows from everywhere and is the same at any point. As such, a rhizome has no center, which makes it difficult to uproot or destroy. Atka understands herself in that way.

Also referred to as the ‘body without organs’, Atka sings about this constant state of “meaningless” non-linear, unstructured, non-hierarchical flux of forming, deforming and reforming. In this understanding of the self, desire is not lack, which suggests negativity. It is affirmative in its state of movement and change – desire here, is always a desire of becoming. Inspired by the sculptures and installations of the French American artist Louise Bourgeois, Atka also describes the rhizomatic structure of the self as one that carries trauma experienced in the domestic realm. Lyrics like “There was a woven child spinning threads around the room” directly speak of Luis Bourgeois’ horrifying but eerie portrayal of domestic abuse and try to make sense of the female experience in the domestic realm and beyond. This is a story of her own experience and that of the women in her life.

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