Who or what is Hilde? A person? An idea? A sound? A band? A combination of all these aspects? When searching for Hilde, you come across singer Marie Daniels, violinist Julia Brüssel, trombonist Maria Trautmann and cellist Emily Wittbrodt. They formed as a quartet under the Hilde logo in 2018 and caused a stir with their first album "Open" in 2020. From the outside, their new album "Tide" is a completely new beginning. The uninhibited, uninhibited playing of their debut gives way to a clear commitment to beauty and a dwelling in sound. And a bit of revolt is also allowed now and again. What has remained is Hilde's absolute unpredictability, each song surprises with new colours, timbres, playing positions and dramaturgies.
As perfectly attuned as the quartet is to each other and as precisely arranged and realised as the songs may be, it is never about perfection. Much is still the result of collective improvisation. One of Hilde's great strengths lies in finding completely unexpected, sometimes downright daring hinges between abstract sound invention and traditional grace. In order to focus this common endeavour, they worked together in the studio with producer Peter Rubel, who is known as the singer of the pop band Düsseldorf Düsterboys.
Hilde - and this brings us back to the question posed at the beginning - is always Hilde. It hardly matters from whom which playful impulse, which sound colour, composition or spontaneous idea comes. Four musicians grow together to form one person, Hilde, an individual with four heads and eight arms, who confronts us with massive gentleness on "Tide". "We like beautiful things," Hilde exclaims in unison. For her, improvisation is an expression of freedom that excludes nothing and allows everything. The foundation for this intuitive unity lies much deeper than the much-cited mutual trust within a band. It is based on a benevolent reliability rarely experienced in this unbreakable form, which gives each of the four musicians a sense of security that they need to be able to go to the extreme as Hilde and always reach the innermost - and vice versa.
