Review
Genre and Mood
Marbert Rocel’s My Bed is electronic music from a band that crosses electro-pop, the genre German Wikipedia files them under, with the nu jazz and broken beat that Juno heard on their album. The mood is bittersweet and playful, both in the band’s own words: they make music in major with chords in minor, and their label calls it exhilarating, but always with a stroke of bittersweet pain.
Song Summary
My Bed is the fifth of thirteen tracks on Catch A Bird, the trio’s second album, and at three minutes and three seconds it is the shortest. The credits are a small band’s: Antje Seifarth sings, Alexander Binder plays bass, Thomas Hübner acoustic guitar and Panthera Krause saxophone, while Marcel Aue programs; Aue and Krause wrote it, Krause the words. Three tracks later the album has a song called Your Bed, two minutes longer.
Musical Breakdown
No review describes My Bed on its own, so this breakdown stays with what its credits and the album’s descriptions say.
Main Section
Listen for the meeting of the played and the programmed. Juno heard the album as soulful techno in which guitar and clarinet layers feature as prominently as synth keys, and on this track the credits name the acoustic guitar, the bass and the saxophone. The band’s recipe for the album, written as a playful fable, lists keys, purring basslines, transformer drums, brass and a lovely distant voice.
Outro
How the track ends is not described in any source. With only three minutes, notice whether it closes like a song or fades like a groove.
Concepts in Focus
The band’s line about major and minor is a lesson in the minor key. A melody can sound bright while the chords under it are minor, and the result is the bittersweet colour their label describes: cheerful on top, sad underneath.
The band’s biography tells, as a joke, of dogs trained to imitate bass drums and Fender Rhodes before Malik and Panthera focused on MPC and computer instead. The MPC is a sampler that works as a drum machine, and its programmed beats are the frame around the instruments played here.
Artistic Context
Marbert Rocel formed in Erfurt in 2004 and are based in Leipzig: the producers Marcel Aue (Malik) and Robert Krause (Panthera Krause) with the singer Antje Seifarth (Spunk). Their first album, Speed Emotions, came out on Compost Records in 2007; Catch A Bird followed in autumn 2009, with Bandcamp, YouTube and Compost each giving a different day. Marbert Rocel – Hush Now, the album’s twelfth track, comes from the same record.
Impact and Reception
Juno called Catch A Bird lively and unpredictable and singled out Ba Ba Bounce and Clappeople rather than this song. Compost uploaded My Bed to YouTube in 2017, eight years after release. It is here for the small scale of its pleasures. Three minutes; play it twice.
