While the Western world celebrates Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 300th anniversary, Gudrun Gut, too, appears to be drawn “back to nature”. Yet what a misapprehension that would be. Although nature plays a major role on Gudrun Gut’s first album release since her outings with the Greie Gut Fraktion in 2009, “Wildlife” does not portray nature as a cosy ur-idyll, but rather as a realm filled with rough tenderness and its very own dangers. Nature is where the unforeseen might happen and new sights are set on the in- and exterior. In this spirit, “Wildlife” is no gesture of severance (“Okay, I’m off to the countryside!”), but rather one of biographical continuity via new means. After all, Gudrun Gut – in her guise as Berlin post punk activist, label owner, radio presenter or party promoter – has always been interested in gaps, niches and risky locations. Now, nature itself provides such a small and utopian niche; a place where “it” might happen in a very existential sense.

All of the album’s tracks took shape in Gudrun Gut’s Uckermark hideaway, an hour or two away from Berlin. During production, in autumn and winter, this landscape exudes an almost eerie calm, suggesting that the outside world’s hectic universe of data and projects is no more than a figment of our collective imagination. Gudrun Gut took this silence in her stride – it did not make her nervous, but free, focused and productive. The Uckermark’s woods, fields and meadows foster a unique sense of immersion (see cover), one that becomes tangible in Gut’s vocal performance: As if she was circling an empty centre, as if she grew apart from her being only to rediscover herself, Gut sings about those ephemeral states between enchantment and reverie. At the same time, she is aware that beauty may be accompanied by emptiness and that even the most luscious garden may soon have to wi.......
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