"GOLDEN FUTURE"

Yes and no, the glimmer of someday and pop as Zen meditation

"I am the worst thing that can happen to you...I am just a glimmer of an someday."

The first lines and bars of this album already give you an idea: Paradise is a feel-good oasis of the third kind, 'golden future' feel-good music in a clever way that plays with expectations and associations 17 and 4; you don't know what the worst is and you watch the melodies in confusion as they rise like soap bubbles in a fairytale forest, burst on the thorns of the branches and fall as wooden beads onto the dwarves' feet.

Hardly anyone currently sees a golden future for all of us. Not even a silver one. Sievers nevertheless makes this song the title track of his debut album. And it turns out to be a clever description of the present. Each line throws a spanner in the works of the other and simple answers are exposed as phrases. A stroke of genius between cynicism and love of humanity. A Trojan super hit and, as the story goes, the first Paradise song, a blueprint for lines like "Are those really wind turbine or earth-drive propellers over there?" (Discoscooter) or "We can do anything and want very little and when we want, we don't trust that we're allowed to." (Dürren die das).

Some people know Florian Sievers as part of the pop duo Talking to Turtles. Under the stage name 'Das Paradies', Sievers writes and sings in his native language for the first time, and he does it with impressive ease,as if he had done nothing else his entire life. What is going on here?

Sievers' music is characterized by indie rock of the "world-famous slacker" variety and features subtle touches of sound from the reggae, dub and deep house worlds; there is a friendly, almost hippie-esque atmosphere.

Sievers chewed together the word and sound world of Das Paradies as a part-time hermit in his Leipzig studio. A 20 square meter trial-and-error space, just an hour's ICE onboard restaurant from the windowless but legendary Berlin Einhornstudio of his friend and producer Simon Frontzek. Whenever they had time, they recorded this heavenly lazy masterpiece together. A bridge day production between the pub and the mixing desk. It took a while, of course. Das Paradies is not a nerd.

As a connoisseur of the times, his observations and the resulting phrases are always wonderfully sophisticated."I smoke, smoke, smoke, only when I'm not sleeping, not an addiction, just a way to break up my time"(The giraffe stretches) is one of those typical, deeply relaxed Sievers sentences. Meditative, contemplative. Paradise fundamentally doubts every position before it possibly becomes an annoying attempt to protect the status quo. Once the right word has been found, he lets it go again. Pop as Zen meditation in a world in which people are hardening their positions again.

"The universe doesn't know how it feels right now. What looks like a yes could also be a no. I didn't mean that seriously about all of us."An album that leaves us with these lines can be a release from paranoia or a plea for relaxation, or both.