Fenster

Fenster emerged from Berlin as a duo project led by JJ Weihl and Jonathan Jarzyna, shaping a lean yet atmospheric strain of experimental pop that echoes the xx alongside Mazzy Star. Once inked to Morr Music, the outfit built its profile on daring records such as Pink Caves in 2014 and Emocean the following year, the latter serving as the score for a self-made sci-fi feature bearing the identical title.

Weihl, originally from New York City, had already collaborated musically with Jarzyna in Berlin before relocating back to her native city for a relationship that eventually dissolved, prompting her return to the German capital around the middle of 2010. Their reunion sparked songwriting sessions inside Jarzyna’s studio, after which the pair busked across the city to gather resources. Adopting the moniker Fenster to honor the manner in which a window outlines expansive vistas, the duo commenced serious tracking with their associate producer Tadklimp starting in January 2011. The resulting material caught Morr Music’s attention, yielding a 7" single that October and the debut full-length Bones in the first months of 2012. To expand the live presentation, Weihl and Jarzyna brought Rémi Letournelle into the lineup.

In 2013 the trio relocated to a remote cabin in eastern Germany for their next effort, rigging the entire site with microphones to capture both original compositions and incidental noises from the surroundings. That process yielded Pink Caves, issued in 2014 and marked by an intensified focus on experimentation and ambient textures. Their subsequent undertaking proved even more expansive: Emocean, released near the close of 2015, doubled as the soundtrack to a matching sci-fi film in which the members also starred, wrote the script, directed, co-produced, and co-shot the project. Their following release maintained this bold ethos through self-imposed rules designed to ensure balanced input from each participant. Isolating themselves inside a residential studio in Italy, the group composed and arranged every track collectively within the same space, resulting in the 2018 album titled The Room.