Spite by Remo Helfenstein

Meeting vulnerability with persistence, Lucerne-based musician Remo Helfenstein presents Spite, his first solo album on Präsens Editionen. Whereas his 2020 debut EP, Comforting Katharina, traced raw, devotional impulses, Spite expands the terrain—balancing psychedelic drift with sudden moments of clarity, wounded grandeur with flashes of pop transcendence.

The record thrives on contradiction: oscillating between the no wave austerity of Suicide and the meditative (and dadaist) expanses of Bitchin Bajas and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s collaborative work, while opening into passages of gospel-infused spaciousness. At times intimate and porous, at times expansive and ecstatic, Helfenstein shapes a sound world that fuses analog and digital processes—both deeply personal and insistently collective. This duality comes to life most strikingly in recordings with fellow musicians Klara Germanier (background vocals and guitar), Raphael Loher (keys), Manuel Troller (guitar), and Olivier Vogel (bass), featured in various constellations across all seven tracks.

Spite is not devotional music, but devotion itself: unyielding, uncompromising, vital. It insists on its own necessity—created because it had to be. The album is available on vinyl, for streaming, and as a digital release via Präsens Editionen.

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Living and working in Lucerne, Remo Helfenstein has been involved in a range of band projects, most prominently as the leader of the new wave outfit Les Yeux Sans Visage. Since the late 2010s, he has also explored solo work, culminating in his debut EP, Comforting Katharina, in 2020. Recent invitations to perform at Kraut Festival and in Mahtola Wittmer’s exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern paved the way for his first solo album, Spite.

Präsens Editionen was founded in 2011 to give home to zweikommasieben Magazin. Ever since a bunch of magazines, books, zines, records, tapes and oddities have been published.

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