"No Friends" is something like a digital pen pal relationship turned into an album between the home producer Mensing, who works in Hamburg, and the raw talent of siii3eyes, who currently lives in Florida. The latter spent his youth in New York and got hooked on rap there, while the former has a pretty good standing in a very busy part of the London underground scene. But before we examine how the two got to know each other and their work together, we should definitely turn on some music first. Track number four, "Night Shift", is also special because it is where the whole album started. Mensing embeds the vocals on a melancholic beat, glides into the song in a sad, jazzy way - and then siii3eyes' fast, urgent rap starts, which gets right under your skin. In the middle of the song he literally defines his working method: "Scratching notes out bout my real life / What to say when the air's tight / What to write when you're out of mind!" And then, combative and devastating at the same time: "I always wondered what it feel like / not to have a worry / but fuck it, can I?"

At this point you have to know: siii3eyes was born in Honduras, came to America with his family at an early age, is considered a migrant worker and fought for years to get an official work permit. When he took on Mensing's demo called "Night Shift" - the first one that he had sent him - siii3eyes had just come from the night shift in an Amazon warehouse. "When Keno first contacted me around 2022, I didn't respond for a while," says siii3eyes. "I had to sort out other things in my life and work hard to even make ends meet. At the time, I had just finally gotten my work permit. When I wrote to him, I first apologized. Working in the Amazon warehouses was wearing me out. One morning I thought to myself: 'Damn, I haven't made a track in so long.' And then Keno's message came to mind. I finally replied to him, he sent me 'Night Shift' - and then it started."

Keno Mensing also remembers this moment: "I don't even know why I called the instrumental 'Night Shift'. Probably because I had worked on it half the night myself. It was a working title. And then this sketch of his came back - and hit me hard." The reason: "There is a lot of pain in the voice. At least that's my interpretation. 'Night Shift' suddenly fit perfectly as a title because siii3eyes had come from the night shift and was completely exhausted, as he had to work during the day now and again at the time. This story is actually a love song. He is mourning someone. But then you hear how all the other problems flow into the lyrics. That really impressed me. That's when I first realized that there was a life situation behind it that was completely different to mine." Mensing admits that he thinks about this point all the time, especially in connection with the release.


The album will be released primarily in Germany first and is sponsored by Initiative Musik. There will be no concerts in Europe due to siii3eyes' visa situation – he seems to be wondering whether this is somehow cultural exploitation. An interpretation that siii3eyes does not share at all: "At the end of the day, I have to say: working with Keno was the best teamwork I could have imagined. At first I thought it would be difficult because of the great distance between us, but we clicked from day one. I don't think it was easy for him at times because he had to take on other things as well as producing. I let my lyrics, my feelings and all the other 'deep stuff' flow into this album - but without Keno, it would never have found this form." How well rounded this "form" sounds and works is shown by a track like "Always November", on which the London singer and harpist Rozsa can be heard in the chorus: siii3eyes raps about loneliness and friends who are no longer there: "lowkey juss wanna be by myself, where did friends go? nothing needed to say i'm one call away if you want to talk who was there when we wanted a day off? i rather walk. than to ask you for a mile." Rozs

later records the first line with her warm voice: "lowkey juss wanna be by myself". Mensing's beats are like the pulse of the song, reduced but on point, now and then sad string samplers set gentle accents without overdoing the autumn melancholy. "Lost" is also a good example of the perfect interplay of pointed production, charismatic rap storytelling and a fresh but incredibly strong voice: Here, the Chicago-based songwriter and singer Tally Schwenk sings - another talent that deserves a much bigger stage. Mensing knows that when he puts two voices of this caliber into a track, there is no need for an instrumental that takes center stage. He says:

"I made a conscious decision to use as few layers as possible on the whole album. Just samples and a few plug-ins. I just really like the minimalist approach to sampling. The search for a simple loop that works so well for me that you don't need anything else and the mood carries over the whole song."

Just pressed the stop button - and rewound. To explain how Keno Mensing works and why he has a credible standing, especially in the London underground scene (which is how he was discovered on siii3eyes), we have to take a look at his previous releases. He made his first beats as a young man for the band Luc von Mensing, which he founded with a friend from his home town of Oldenburg. It was melancholic, German-language rap - pretty good at times, as you can hear on the mini-album "Aus Liebe". When the band split up after a brief high that led to them appearing on the stage at the Deichbrand Festival, Keno was hooked and continued to work on beats and songs. "I carried on a bit out of desperation. Because I was in the mood and didn't really know what to do with the beats, I uploaded some to Soundcloud." For a few years, only his circle of friends heard it now and again, but then one day the London musician Tee Peters got in touch. "We made the first song and it clicked like a charm." Dozens more followed.

"Through him, I got a bit into the London underground scene and then produced a lot of songs for rappers from London. That's when I realized that I didn't want to just make beats and send them out into the airwaves - that is, offer beat CDs or packages and just see who picks what. I like getting to know the artists and trying to write beats based on their style."

He is looking for a balance between his own style and the style of the rappers, which is always his focus. In 2021, Mensing released his "own" EP called "Tesselate" for the first time and brought selected London artists on board: Tee Peters, of course, Phlocalyst, Thomas Day, Tally Schwenk, Loux. All names that are worth checking out, because as Mensing rightly says:

"If you dig into this very small scene, you find a bunch of incredibly talented people who should all be much bigger."

Mensing also worked a lot for the German underground label "Besser-Samstag". His music can therefore be found regularly in big playlists such as "Jazz Rap" or "Lo-Fi House", where it fits in very well with its often relaxed groove. Mensing himself says that he didn't come up with this sound so much through jazzy UK or US rap, but first through a German producer who found his roots in it: "The first beats that flashed me came from Dexter, who of course found his inspiration in Dilla and Co., but I didn't know that at the beginning. At the time, I was excited about everything that came out of the Cologne label Melting Pot: Twit One, Suff Daddy, all that. I thought the label was so cool that it even influenced my decision to study in Cologne. After that, I was really caught up in this wave of jazzy UK rap again - everything that was brought to the surface with Loyle Carner's first album." Mensing finally discovered siii3eyes through his London connection: "The producer flamingo zamperoni, whom I really respect, made an EP with him in 2021: 'east end poet'. I thought it was absolutely awesome - and then I was totally shocked that siiieyes hardly had any listeners." He wrote to him anyway - or maybe because of that. With a familiar outcome. A jump across the Atlantic: to an apartment in Miami, from which siiieyes zooms with us. "I did my first freestyles when I was 13," he says.

He and his friend Shane simply started out: "We loved the Wu-Tang Clan and MF Doom, bought a small notebook, wrote lyrics together in it - but didn't really take it seriously at first." At 15, he bought an old, refurbished MacBook and recorded his first songs. He noticed that it was good for him to let out the things that moved him in this way. At 17, he had the idea of ​​taking things a little more seriously. He searched for and found beats on YouTube, and built his first tracks using the GarageBand software. "When I was 20, I had a really crappy time. I lived in my car for a while because I couldn't afford an apartment, and rapped my tracks into these old wired headphones from my iPhone." During the pandemic, he continued to work on his rap skills, freestyled daily, wrote lyrics, and emailed many producers - some of them, including flamingo zamperoni and later Mensing, got in touch. Writing and rapping have become an important part of his life: "No matter what situation I'm going through, as soon as I put it on paper, I feel completely liberated. It's no longer in my head, you know? I've set it in stone once - and if it becomes a whole track, I've made something out of it that I can be proud of." Which song is he particularly proud of? "I would like people to listen to 'Diamonds Are Rare' over and over again. This track captures my vibe and my struggle to become a better person the best. But good people are rare - just like diamonds are. We definitely have better things to do than just look into the world of fame and fortune. I think the song just has a good message." The hook is sung by a former colleague of Keno Mensing - KARLY, who should definitely sing on records more often. The beat captures what Mensing says about his own production style and taste quite well: "I've always liked stuff that was a bit stumbling around, but at the same time straight in its style - but not too jazzy and not too experimental. People like Dexter and Apollo Brown were always good at that."

At this point, it should be said again that Keno Mensing takes on a little more than the role of producer. In a way, he is also something like the final editor of siii3eyes: "He writes lyrics and raps, it's his story, but I then work on the songs very intensively. I get a lot of traces from him, which sometimes don't have a clearly recognizable structure. I then look for the elements that could be a chorus or a verse and coordinate them with him. Some tracks are a pretty complex puzzle, even if you don't hear that from the beats and the final track." That can basically be said about the entire album "No Friends": Between the skits in which 3iiieyes talks to his former friend and roommate (with whom he later fell out, which also explains the title), he and Mensing provide rough, immediate insights into the emotional life of a man who raps about his life and self-realization. Tracks like "Lost", "Noir" with the Flemish jazz trumpeter and producer Phlocalylist and Gandalf in Blue Jenans (behind the original name lies the newly christened musician alter ego of fellow music journalist Manuel Berger), the title track, "1000 Times" and those already mentioned strike the perfect balance between soulful, jazzy storytelling rap and a lyrical intensity and authenticity that is usually more common in street rap. But what Mensing primarily wants to achieve with "No Friends" is: "That people get to know this exciting guy. And if I could contribute something to that, hey, all the better.