ANNA MABO - VOCALS, GUITAR

Open air concert (in case of bad weather in the Stadttheater Gmunden)

"Mittelschwere Ekstase" is the name of Anna Mabo's fourth album. There are 14 songs, filled with exhilaratingly virtuoso music, with even denser works of linguistic art in the place where other artists write "lyrics", and with such an independent vocal beauty that the work seems to come from a different and undoubtedly better world.
With Mabo's previous three records, "Die Oma hat die Susi so geliebt", "Notre Dame" and "Danke gut", the titles were reliably false leads: anyone who put the record on was imagining something, and this idea was immediately gently but firmly pushed aside by the first song. "Mittelschwere Ekstase", on the other hand, is also new in this sense: it contains what it says on the tin. On this fourth record, so vulnerable and yet invincible, yes, really, Anna Mabo is in ecstasy. Like every detail of her work, the classification "medium-heavy" comes from her herself, so it is up to us to imagine what a heavy ecstasy looks or even sounds like with Anna Mabo.
What does a blind man know? is what they say in Vienna, but I think ecstasy here only means (what does only mean?) love, which feels old-fashioned and totally modern at the same time. "And it doesn't bother me that my knee pad still smells like you", sings Anna Mabo in the bewitchingly beautiful song "Dirty Dancing", and in the perhaps even more touching "warten schwer" she sings: "With you, nothing is difficult for me except waiting for you".
At another point, Anna Mabo sighs as if in a kind of shuddering premonition of Bachmann's thirtieth year: "I'm just not twenty anymore". Eh. Here is now an artist who has been writing and singing her songs as a profession for a decade, who has traveled far, who has been funny and sad along the way, but is now more determined than ever not to let the sadness of the world win.
(Ernst Molden, Vienna, Summer 2025)

An evening for all those who want to experience the art of song in its most personal form - in the open air, by the water, and very close to Anna Mabo and her stories.