ATKA Releases New Track 'Desiring Machines' & Announces Debut EP

Atka, the London and Berlin-based musician, songwriter, and producer has today announced her debut EP The Eye Against the Ashen Sky, due out November 3, 2023. Along with the EP announcement, FLOOD Magazine has premiered the video for “Desiring Machines,” the first single from the EP, which Atka directed and edited herself.

They wrote "Penned while working on her master thesis last summer, the track plays out like a gently building Florence + the Machine ballad crafted by the heartland-rock and post-punk proclivities of Gang of Youths."

The tracks of the EP were produced primarily with modular and analogue synthesizers and guitars in the South-London home studio of Jung Kim, the lead guitarist of the band Gang of Youths. For the mix, Stephen Sedgwick, the trusted mixer/sound engineer of the Gorillaz, Damon Albarn and Blur, was at work.

Atka, whose real name is Sarah Neumann, wrote The Eye Against The Ashen Sky last year in London while completing her master’s degree in philosophy, in which she intensively studied French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s theory of the gaze. On the EP, Neumann processes the academic debate through storytelling in a close, tangible manner.

Here, intellectual interests and personal experiences blur into an autobiographical work about shame and paranoia. Track after track, The Eye Against The Ashen Sky meanders deeper and deeper through various manifestations of these emotional worlds to their origin in the overwhelming gaze of the Other.

"Desiring Machines" is a clear reference to the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari's books Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus and 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 lacking, 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 Louise 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. 

ABOUT ATKA

Although the 25-year-old from Brandenburg, Germany, has been writing, producing and recording her own music for years, Atka has so far remained in the background of the music industry. Growing up in a tiny village in Germany, she moved to the beaches of the Gold Coast in Australia at the age of 15 and later to the snowy mountains in Squamish, Canada, until she found a home in London.

Initially pursuing a career in sustainability research and politics, Atka quickly became disillusioned by the bureaucracy of the political system and instead considered going into filmmaking. A few self-directed short films, runner- and costume assistant jobs later, she however returned to music. As a widely read music nerd, she became a journalist for Rolling Stone, Groove and Musikexpress, among others.

With her own music however, she has only been tinkering in private – whether on her walks through St. James Park to procrastinate writing her master’s thesis, on the tube on the way to Soho or in her improvised home studio in East London. Atka comes up with ideas mostly when she is on the move. Incorporating that constant movement into her music she wants her songs to create a cinematic feel – or how she describes it: to be “journey-esque”.

A versatile musician who cites Joy Division and Kraftwerk as her most formative influences, she wrote her first song at the age of ten and later gained the attention of big names in the music scene for her poetic lyrics and unique flair for music production and composition. 

Photo Credit: Anh Le

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