In Conversation with Katharina Felder
Twelve minutes with one of the most quietly uncompromising voices in Austrian experimental music.
We met Katharina Felder in a café on Herrengasse in Graz the morning after the final show of her "Atemweg" tour. She had driven back from Innsbruck overnight and was working on her third coffee.
On the writing residency in Vorarlberg.
"I spent eleven weeks in a cabin above Schruns. No broadband, no editor. I recorded everything into a Tascam on my kitchen table. Half of the final album is those takes — untreated, wrong microphone, bird in the left channel. That's the record."
"I do not believe a vocal should be edited into a lie. If I can hear the breath, you should hear it too."
On turning down a major-label offer in 2024.
"They wanted a three-album deal in Euro, payable against a marketing spend I would not control. The advance was not small. But it would have cost me the right to say no to a remix — and saying no is most of my job."
On extended technique.
"People write about the whistle register and the multiphonics as if they are stunts. They are not. They are just the cheapest part of the voice — the part you find when you stop trying to sing beautifully."
What comes next.
A collaboration with the TU Wien acoustics department on resonance mapping in heritage churches. A possible residency in Linz in the autumn. No new album announced — "not until I have something to say that I have not already said."