WITCHZ

About WITCHZ

WITCHZ emerged from the Berlin underground in 2014, though calling them a Berlin act feels reductive considering how much time founding member Sarah Koenig spent bouncing between squats in Kreuzberg and her parents' basement in Munich. She started making tracks on a borrowed laptop with cracked software, layering field recordings from abandoned buildings over synth loops that sound like they're dissolving in real time. The early stuff was pretty raw, but you could already hear the DNA of what would become their signature sound.

The project stayed mostly invisible until 2016, when Hexagon started circulating on SoundCloud and caught the attention of a few key tastemakers. That track shouldn't work on paper — eleven minutes of glacial synth pads interrupted by these jarring metallic clangs — but it does. Tri Angle Records signed them shortly after, which made sense given the label's track record with artists who operate in that shadowy zone between ambient and something more unsettling.

Their 2017 debut album Void Prayer arrived with almost no warning. It's a record that demands you sit with it in the dark, preferably on decent headphones. Neon Witch is probably the closest thing to a conventional song on there, if you consider a five-minute descent into pitch-shifted vocals and arrhythmic bass stabs conventional. The album got written up in The Wire and Resident Advisor, and suddenly WITCHZ went from bedroom project to someone people actually paid attention to.

Koenig expanded the live setup after Void Prayer, bringing in visual artist Tobias Meyer and occasionally a second synth player, though the lineup has always been fluid. Their shows became these immersive installations, all strobing lights and fog machines, which sounds gimmicky but somehow isn't when the music is that intense. They played Atonal festival in 2018 and apparently the sound system couldn't quite handle the sub-bass frequencies they were pushing. Equipment failure as performance art.

The follow-up record Black Mirror came out in 2019 and found them pulling back slightly from the harsher textures. Crystalline is almost pretty, if your definition of pretty includes slowly evolving drone layers that feel like ice forming in your chest. Some longtime fans thought they'd gone soft. Others recognized it as a different kind of challenge — harder to make something genuinely beautiful when your whole aesthetic is built on tension and decay.

These days WITCHZ is quieter as a project. Koenig relocated to somewhere in rural Brandenburg during the pandemic and has been releasing the occasional single, but nothing that suggests a third album is imminent. She's been doing sound design work for installations and the odd film score. The Bandcamp page still gets updated. Whether WITCHZ becomes a full focus again or remains this periodic transmission from wherever Koenig happens to be working remains unclear, which feels appropriate somehow.

WITCHZ shows are sparse and focused. People stop talking when they start. The crowd tends to be still, leaning in rather than moving around. You hear a lot of synth feedback and extended silences. It's not a party. It's not cathartic. It's absorbing.

Known for Hexagon, Void Prayer, Neon Witch, Crystalline, Black Mirror

See WITCHZ Live