FEATURE:
Spotlight
UCHE YARA released her debut album, BODYSCANNER. There were promotional interviews around it, and I want to come to some. I will pop in a review of the album. This is an artist I am a little fresh to. Let’s get to some recent interviews, so that we can discover more about this amazing artist. She is a multi-instrumentalist with Nigerian roots. She grew up in Austria and now lives in Berlin. I want to start with DORK and their interview from last month. As I am new to YARA, I am sort of learning about her through interviews. The path to BODYSCANNER:
“Her debut album, ‘BODYSCANNER’, arrives two EPs and three years after that. Eleven tracks. She wrote them, produced them and played most of them, with nobody behind her in the studio suggesting the chorus might want to come in earlier. Her explanation of how it got made: “I’ve written the album with my body, and now my mind knows it.”
Pressed on what writing with your body actually entails, she is admirably specific about something essentially unprovable. “It’s about going back to the deepest, most innocent place of intuition. I stop thinking so much and suddenly I’m writing and recording things that almost feel like they’ve always been there. It effortlessly satisfies me on such a deep level. It feels round and urgent at the same time.”
She was trained to do the opposite. She started on classical percussion as a child and put six years into it, wrote her first small pieces for marimba, picked up an electric guitar at 13 and was writing songs by 16. At 17, a teacher put her in front of the management team she still works with, on the strength of a batch of demos that, she says “will probably never see the light of day”. The other option on the table was medicine. “Somehow the path away from becoming a doctor and towards music became more and more obvious,” she says.
She moved to Berlin in 2021, the week after school finished, mostly because her team was already there. It did not immediately take. “It’s really only over the last year that Berlin has started to feel like home to me,” she says. “Berlin has opened my eyes in so many ways. It showed me that things aren’t just black and white, but that there’s so much colour in between… in identity, in art, in music.”
‘DIVA CLUB’, the album’s most immediately euphoric moment, was assembled the same way round as everything else. The instrumental sat about for months with no words attached. “I kept coming back to it, already with a pretty concrete structure and some melody ideas, but I had no lyrics.” So she applied the only rule she seems to hold. “I remembered my number one thing in songwriting: the song will tell me what it wants anyway. So I sat down and listened. What I heard was: arena, sport, adrenaline, cheering, this feeling of setting off, goofiness.”
What it wanted was a roller derby captain marshalling a chaotic FLINTA team towards victory, FLINTA being the German-speaking scene’s collective term for women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people. It went in as camp and came out as something rather sturdier, a discovery she also made in arrears. “It was really through playing it live that I realised how much power the song carries.”
What she wants from the album is stated with no hedging whatsoever. “I want them to trance out. To feel possessed by the song, rocked by it, moved by it. I also want there to be a certain kind of eeriness to it. I want to transport you into a world of its own, maybe even one you can’t fully figure out”.
I was captured by an Off Key interview. Regarding BODYSCANNER, it is “Confident, honest and radical in root and execution, the self-produced record shines through a multi-facetted club sound that demands to be experienced”. I do wonder whether UCHE YARA will perform in the U.K. next year. It would be interesting to see BODYSCANNER come to life on the stage:
“A pulse of electronic sound waves, hypnotic vocals and a striking guitar riff pull you into UCHE YARA’s debut album “BODYSCANNER”. The record blends club textures with sharp, memorable lyrics. As a multifaceted artist and multi-instrumentalist, UCHE YARA has been creating genre-bending music for years. All these facets now merge perfectly in “BODYSCANNER”, which she recorded with collaborator Alex the Flipper. “I always thought working on an album would be super stressful, but it was a flowing process. It felt as if I wrote this album with my body, just giving my intuition free rein”, she says.
This focus on the body, the self, connecting with itself and others is a central theme of the album. “I can only connect with others when I am connected with myself, when I am present, and when there is space for myself and for the connection itself. Connections happen when your inner child awakens, when there is resonance.”
Playing off the theme of the x-ray scans, the song “BODYSCANNER” asks the listener to remove all their layers: “Please, remove all your layers, I’m your body scanner, let me see who you are.” I asked UCHE YARA whether letting other people see who she is makes her freer or more vulnerable. “It is a tension between both and it depends on the space whether I feel safe removing my layers,” she says. There is multiple layers to the lyrics, UCHE explains. “They are superficial yet turn the focus inward. To me, this is similar to the experience of being in a club: being seen but also observed. I only realised the depth of the song after creating it.”
A central theme of BODYSCANNER is the tension between how we see ourselves and how we are seen. I asked UCHE YARA about her experience of it: “I have realised, through the process of this album, that I am read as a Black woman. I am from a white country, a white environment. I have lived so naively, but I am being read politically, and I only really noticed this in Berlin, in my community. It is extremely interesting to work through this now. I have lived in a parallel universe within my own body.”
This is where the tension, the disconnect between how people are being perceived and how they perceive themselves, was most evident, she has ever realised. Her community and Berlin have helped her work through this, yet she still feels disconnected, especially from Berlin club culture. I wanted to know what UCHE YARA would change about the club culture: “People need to be more attentive; we need greater understanding of the singularity of the moment and the space we share. It should be understood as a collective musical experience. We shouldn’t try to be digestible for a certain crowd we’re scared of not fitting in with. I had the best club experience at a BiPoC Queers-only event. Everyone was just there to experience the music together. But the casualness of drug use, the need to consume to connect, which is present at too many events, should be questioned. Overall, we need safer spaces. Clubs need more funding and education about the origins of club culture too”.
Prior to coming to a review of BODYSCANNER, I want to include part of an NME interview. Some amazing U.K. press for an artist who many would like to see come back here soon. Despite the fact I am a little new to the phenomenal UCHE YARA, I am hooked by BODYSCANNER. For anyone else who has not really explored her music, I would suggest you listen to it now:
“The mood change of Yara’s newer material is a softer alternative to the “cold and edgy” environments where she often finds herself in her adopted hometown of Berlin, a far cry from where she grew up in Austria: a village on the outskirts of Linz, a tranquil city on the Danube River. There, she was trained classically at a local music school by educators who taught her that music was a “playground”.
“I was so lucky to be led by teachers that pushed this inner child in me,” she says. “Even as a child I was always creative and pushing for something that I hadn’t heard or seen before.” She’s quick to credit those teachers with instilling a classic rigour and an avant-garde fearlessness in her: “These are the people that laid the soil where everything is growing right now.”
Those teachers helped prime Yara for her transformation into a seasoned live performer. Yara is currently touring behind ‘Bodyscanner’, with a live show where she performs in the middle of the room, surrounded by the audience. “It’s even better if there isn’t even a stage,” she says. “At first people don’t know how to act, but they’re instantly immersed. They’re like, ‘whoa, what is even happening?’ And I love that.”
In 2023, Yara told NME that being on stage has always felt “natural” to her. She played festivals like Wilderness and The Great Escape before releasing any music, and as guitarist for Austrian punk-funk band Bilderbuch, opened for The Rolling Stones in Vienna in 2022. As of June, she’s officially Bilderbuch’s touring guitarist, having replaced longtime member Michael “Snacky Mike” Krammer. The new position in Bilderbuch, who perform at arenas and festival mainstages in their home country, “came as a shock”, but she is delighted to be “playing with my heroes”. “It makes me emotional,” she adds, saying she is a little “intimidated by the job” but honoured at the same time.
In her own solo career, Yara is increasingly making body music that invokes Grace Jones and FKA Twigs at her most avant-garde – songs that are certainly built for the club. But she didn’t initially feel at home in Berlin’s storied techno venues. Yara moved to Germany in 2021 to be closer to her management team, but didn’t immediately settle into the local culture. “I always felt like an alien because I didn’t enjoy myself as much as others did [in Berlin],” she says. “I’m not interested in commercialised events, and I find techno to be very harsh, not my taste. All I ever wanted to do was to move.” Salvation eventually came in the form of Fade, a night built around inclusive, community-driven dancefloors. “It’s a BIPOC queer event that is so much about the collective and about the music. The whole thing felt so warm; the feeling of belonging was crazy for me. Finally, I felt at home and not like I was poking out”.
In her own solo career, Yara is increasingly making body music that invokes Grace Jones and FKA Twigs at her most avant-garde – songs that are certainly built for the club. But she didn’t initially feel at home in Berlin’s storied techno venues. Yara moved to Germany in 2021 to be closer to her management team, but didn’t immediately settle into the local culture. “I always felt like an alien because I didn’t enjoy myself as much as others did [in Berlin],” she says. “I’m not interested in commercialised events, and I find techno to be very harsh, not my taste. All I ever wanted to do was to move.” Salvation eventually came in the form of Fade, a night built around inclusive, community-driven dancefloors. “It’s a BIPOC queer event that is so much about the collective and about the music. The whole thing felt so warm; the feeling of belonging was crazy for me. Finally, I felt at home and not like I was poking out”.
I am ending with a review from DORK. There are not a lot of reviews for BODYSCANNER, it is clear that this is such a special album. One that instantly hits you. Go and follow UCHE YARA on social media, and if you can get to see her live then do so. A remarkable artist with many years ahead:
“The opening minute of 'BODYSCANNER' is enough to make you sit up and go: oh, hello. Weird, hypnotic and immediately addictive, its title-track feels less like an introduction than UCHE YARA grabbing your brain, pressing a few undocumented buttons and seeing what happens.
It's a ridiculously confident way to begin a debut album, particularly because there isn't much around right now that sounds quite like it. Yara has described wanting listeners to "trance out" and feel possessed by the song, and mission accomplished. That peculiar repetition burrows in fast. Good luck getting it back out.
The rest of 'BODYSCANNER' has the slightly unenviable job of following it. Nothing quite matches that opening high, although there are ideas everywhere: electronic textures, rock, R&B, strange rhythmic turns and dance music that seems to be examining the club from a funny angle rather than simply trying to make it go off. 'DIVA CLUB', born from Yara imagining herself as captain of a roller derby team, brings some welcome goofiness, too.
What carries the record is the sheer confidence of it. UCHE YARA has made a debut that seems entirely unconcerned with whether you immediately understand what she's doing - you probably won't. You'll want another go, though”.
UCHE YARA is wonderous. I love BODYSCANNER. I love the title track. It is the perfect way to open the album. So pulsating, electric and fascinating. Shadowy and sexy, it is only the start of things. Surprised that there has not been wider exposure and conversation. Let’s hope that this changes, as everyone needs to familiarise themselves with UCHE YARA and the stunning BODYSCANNER. It is a bold, fascinating, powerful and accomplished debut album from…
A name to remember.
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