Anna Mabo | HEAST!

Clemens Sainitzer on “Medium-grade ecstasy”:

everything is ecstasy
because nothing ever stands still

anna mabo releases her fourth album “Mittelschwere Ekstase”.
following the unconditional restlessness of her previous work, mabo continues to write here on her work of perpetual departure, of striving and searching for peace in all things, about the beauty of the world around her and the beauty of the people she encounters. anna mabo and her boys make music with devotion, smoothing out self-inflicted waves and taking refuge in the medium-heavy ecstasy that resembles a restful striving. never committed to movement or stuck at a standstill, we hear the three of them in a state of unbridled becoming, musically and lyrically a dense carpet of different styles and forms spreads out beneath the listener. in the supposed endings and beginnings, the interstices of arrival and departure, all kinds of interesting things have taken root, which mabo joyfully brings out and tries to describe in the light of her clear language.

the “medium-heavy ecstasy” is another crazy attempt by anna mabo and the boys to describe everything with everything. the initial contradiction of the ecstatic (medium) gravity quickly turns out to be an expanded way of looking at the world and the things that happen in it: through the simultaneity of the ecstatic and the aggravation, both aspects claim to be absolutely and completely present, thus forcing the viewer of “medium gravity ecstasy” into the equilibrium of constant change.

true to the premise that PUNK is an expression of utmost vulnerability and compassion, this music has its heart in the right place, stirs up and calms down what needs to be stirred up and calmed down in equal measure and always whispers directly into your ear that every contradiction is an opportunity: utilitarian buildings standing around unused, a nutshell as an optimistic means of transportation across the churning sea or even the absence of a loved one – all places and opportunities to indulge in medium-grade ecstasy in all its ambivalence.

this music is a medium-heavy expression, a revealing of what lies within you, a giving away of what burdens you, to come out of the cares of your own sadness, to stand in the wind breathing freely and say “yes, I’d like an ice cream, because it’s hot”.

Ernst Molden on “Mittelschwere Ekstase”:

“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? 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 and wide with her small but now unbeatable band (Clemens Sainitzer on cello, Alexander Yannilos on drums, yeah!), who was 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