German electro singer and songwriter Masha Qrella crafts tracks that draw evenly from folk, pop, and the expanding electronic scene in her native country. Born to a Russian physicist father and a German somnologist mother, she launched her musical path in the late 1990s after taking cues from Stereolab and Mouse on Mars, joining the groups Mina and Contriva. By the early 2000s she had established herself independently, issuing the single I Want You to Know and the album Luck on Gudrun Gut’s Monika label while sharing stages with Calexico and ISO68. She maintained her partnership with ex-Mina bassist and engineer Norman Nitzsche, and together they constructed the studio Villa Qrella. Amid side work on the soundtrack for Kleinruppin Forever plus assorted remixes and compilation contributions, she prepared her follow-up solo effort Unsolved Remained, which Morr Music brought out in 2005. That same year saw the debut album from her NMFarner project, with a second arriving the next year. Following a U.S. tour and a Contriva reunion, she unveiled Speak Low in 2009, presenting her interpretations of pieces by Kurt Weill and Frederick Loewe. Analogies, released in 2012, contained her most pop-oriented material to date. One year later Morr Music’s sublabel A Number of Small Things put out her 7" single of the Cure’s “Boys Don't Cry.” In 2016 she returned to Morr proper for her fifth album, Keys.
