Marcel Winatschek

How Olli Schulz Spent His Tuesday

Olli Schulz is the kind of German musician who shouldn’t work on paper—too weird, too rambling, too in love with his own tangents—and yet everything he makes lands exactly right. The video for his song Phase is a good example: what apparently started as an idea for a small, low-key short film with his friend Palina Rojinski—a Russian-born German model and TV presenter who is impossible not to like—turned into something more elaborate and stranger, as these things tend to do. Photographer Oliver Rath shot it, grey-haired Donnie O’Sullivan shows up in it, and so does Gisbert zu Knyphausen, whose full aristocratic name—Gisbert Wilhelm Enno Freiherr zu Innhausen und Knyphausen—takes longer to say than most songs. Exactly the kind of company Olli keeps.