Anna Mabo - Moderate Ecstasy - Salzkammergut Festival Weeks Gmunden

"Moderate Ecstasy" is the fourth album by Anna Mabo. It features 14 songs filled with intoxicatingly virtuosic music, with increasingly dense linguistic artworks in the place where other artists have "lyrics," and with such a distinctive beauty of singing that the work seems to come from a different and undoubtedly better world. In Mabo's previous three albums, "Grandma Loved Susi So Much," "Notre Dame," and "Thank You, Good," the titles were reliably misleading: when you put on the record, you imagined something, and that imagination was gently but firmly set aside by the first song. "Moderate Ecstasy," on the other hand, is new in this sense as well: it contains what it promises. On this fourth, so vulnerable yet invincible album, yes, truly, Anna Mabo is in ecstasy. The classification of "moderate" comes from her, like every detail of her work, so it is up to us to imagine what a heavy ecstasy looks or even sounds like for Anna Mabo. What does a blind person know? it is said in Vienna, but I believe that ecstasy here only means (what does "only" mean?) love, which feels both old-fashioned and totally modern at the same time. "And it doesn't bother me that my knee pads still smell like you," sings Anna Mabo in the enchantingly beautiful song "Dirty Dancing," and in the perhaps even more touching "waiting heavy," she sings: "With you, nothing feels heavy except waiting for you." At another point, Anna Mabo sighs as if in a kind of shuddering premonition of Bachmann's Thirtieth Year: "I'm just not twenty anymore." Indeed. Here is an artist who has been writing and singing her songs professionally for a decade, who has traveled widely, who has been joyful and sad on the road, but now shows a stronger determination than ever not to let the world's sadness win. (Ernst Molden, Vienna, Summer 2025) An evening for all who wish to experience song art in its most personal form – in the open air, by the water, and very close to Anna Mabo and her stories. Open-air concert (in case of bad weather at the Stadttheater Gmunden).