Twelve Hours with Jennifer Weist

The format sounds simple enough: take four bands nobody outside their home cities has heard of, put each one in a recording studio with Jennifer Weist—frontwoman of Jennifer Rostock, Germany’s most reliably furious punk-rock outfit—and give them twelve hours to transform a given song into something personal. What comes out the other end tells you something real.

The four acts covered enough ground to suggest someone was at least trying to find the edges of the German indie scene. Kuult, a trio from Essen who’d existed for less than a year and were already selling out small rooms, built their set around covers and an emerging catalog of Deutschpop with an emotional directness their contemporaries seemed embarrassed to attempt. Getting Private in Public, four friends from Munich who’d known each other since elementary school, played folk-indie territory with an ease that came either from years of practice or from genuinely not overthinking it. Ocean Stereo from Hamburg worked in piano-driven post-rock, which can be transcendent or interminable—usually both in the same song. Pari San, a dreampop duo from Freiburg, was the odd one out: Parissa Eskandari’s voice looped and processed by DJ Paul Brenning into something genuinely strange, the kind of act that wins zero popularity contests and stays with you anyway.

The twelve-hour limit is what makes this interesting to think about. It strips out revision, second-guessing, the slow creep of polish that kills a song before it’s finished. You either find the version of the thing that works or you don’t. Kuult turned out to be the act worth tracking—they went on to build a real following in German indie pop, growing steadily without much noise about it. Whether that had anything to do with a studio session under a clock is impossible to say. The pressure clearly didn’t hurt.