Inga Lühning - Hodgepodge, Vol. 2 (2020)

The title „Hodgepodge Vol.2“ of the second album by Inga Lühning and André Nendza leaves no questions open:
The musical rollercoaster ride that began with their 2017 debut continues!

The duo shows itself to be well-rehearsed through countless concerts between festival, church, concert hall and living room, and masters even more precisely the field of tension between compression through the use of loops and the transparency of pure togetherness. The design spectrum ranges from total reduction to individual – precisely selected – additional sounds (e.g. voice percussion, handclaps) and opulent surfaces.

Inga Lühning’s clear, multifaceted voice and André Nendza’s diverse bass creations are naturally at the center of the soundscapes. However, the two always use their virtuosity with a clear eye for what is useful and necessary for the music. In collaboration with sound engineer Christian Heck, they have created a sonorously complex work of enormous depth of field, which one likes to hear again and again with the joy of details.

In terms of content, the theme of „Songs“ continues to take center stage, and so the two musicians focus on an inspired range between powerful compositions of their own and the highly independent interpretations of the music of Degenhardt, BAP, van Veen, Element of Crime and Marianne Faithful.
Lühning & Nendza consciously focus on contrasts.

Soft and hard, melancholy and exuberance, subtle ballads and compact grooves, German songs and English songs. The joy of compositional design is equally balanced with the joy of improvisation. Despite the reduced instrumentation, it never becomes monotonous in this way and the listener is drawn deeply into the spell of the music. Once again, the two artists impressively succeed in bringing together these different, seemingly incompatible worlds into an intense, exciting unity. The alleged general store „Hodgepodge Vol. 2″ turns out to be a harmonious overall picture due to the authentic playing, the skillful song selection and the imaginative design of the music by Inga Lühning & André Nendza.

Or, as Reinhard Köchl already wrote about the duo in 2018 in JAZZTHING: „… In a miraculous way Lühning and Nendza actually succeed in something like squaring the circle here…“