The singer-songwriter Sebastian Krämer uses a surprising number of words.

That's his job.

But at his appearance at the Käs in Frankfurt's Ostend, he also serves up encores between the numbers and right in the middle, where you don't expect spoken words and you don't know them from the records.

Concise prelude and elaborate postlude are characteristic of his works, which are based on the tradition of the German art song and its imitation of the often only invented folk song.

In the concert he adds non-melodic interludes to the non-verbal paratexts.

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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Right in the first song, "Deine Tante", the motto song of his album "Love Songs to Your Aunt", which was awarded the annual prize of the German record critics, he interrupts himself after the third verse to comment on the utterly unpoetic nature of the word "Mettwurststulle". .

The loved one appears enchanted in all her actions, even when she eats a piece of cardboard bread covered in pink and white goo by the sausage fingers of a Berlin meat saleswoman.

Unnecessarily, the singer, as his own glossator, draws attention to the intentional ugliness of this performance, and to top it all he adds a pun.

He lives completely vegan - exception: Hunger.

Double-bottomed and two-part

With that we have reached the point in the lowlands of prosaic to which we will never return: we are in cabaret. And the final sentence from Hanns Dieter Hüsch's song about breaking up applies: the second part begins only in cabaret. With the brutal dichotomy of the Tantenlied, Kramer reveals that it is composed, i.e. put together. Many of his songs are ambiguous in the literal sense of an architectural quality. Her wit shows in the structure, on the second pass through the motif material. The idea sheds its punchline, and listeners are content with a conventional topos when it is drastically or strikingly fleshed out. Even without an aunt, the song is funny enough: infatuation transforms the most everyday detail, including the disgusting.But the real fun is yet to come, on a higher level, on a floor that you never knew existed when you entered the building.

The artistic device of the unnoticed transition is the rhyme, the repetition of the sound that allows a displacement of the thought. In a speech to the public, Krämer includes the request not to pay attention to his rhymes. Those who disobey this command can study what we don't usually pay attention to: the casually placed poetic ideas whose accumulation results from the series of unconstrained phonetic correspondences.

In "Planes over my garden" Kramer finds the following rhyming words for the last word of the first verse: wait, start, types, remained, doted, tender, buried, stared down, standards. The song, made up of stanzas of four lines twice, circles like the object of observation of the lyrical self, which cultivates its garden and lets the big wide world pass over its head. The very first rhyme with "garden" determines the poetic primal situation, which makes it possible for the imagination to wander. The second stanza switches to technique: upon starting, the simplest actual actions of the device, which stimulates the imagination, are drawn into the circle of associated representations.

The species open up a cosmos of evolutionary classification.

The “persistent” serves to expose the contrast between the lonely self and the containers of the world: persevering is the opposite of what airplanes do, and at the same time pathetically heightened waiting, concentrated on the point.

We have reached the turning point and, thanks to a light ritardando, we can realize that it is precisely at this point, at the end of the third verse, that we are typically pausing.

The next loop is followed by rhyming word acrobatics, a looping of romantic self-reference: the planes “fool those who are completely infatuated with the sight of them”.

After the gentle decline with the poetic commonplace of the delicate, even death, the constantly repressed companion of the passengers, comes within reach with the image of the burying, wrapped in a hymn-like invocation of the sun.

The cellist Victor Plumettaz follows the large arches of the Himmelsschreiber in the allotment garden in Frankfurt.

Isn't something still missing?

Here is the second part of the description of the love song, which factually makes a detour with the homage to the aunt, which in terms of verse construction corresponds to the opposite, an abbreviation: the singer makes his rhymes with the "arrogante", "overstretched", "extravagant aunt" because they are "so-called soul mates", he "and the totally misjudged aunt".

The idealization of the loved ones is offset by an overly realistic perception of the secondary characters, including the lover himself. Grotesque details only add to the magic of the whole.

Anyone who has ever felt something like this is himself a misjudged poet.