Mary Ocher

Singer songwriter. Poet. Performer. Anarchist. Director. Avant-gardist. Folk, and Electronica. Mary Ocher is all of these things, and more. Held together through virtuosity, and a streak of wild eccentricity, the Berlin based musician has garnered a knack for her sublime talent. With a politicized sound, that is krautrock, and punk-folk all at the same time, Ocher is a virtuoso, and one of the most gifted musicians around.

Born Mariya Ocheretianskaya in Russia, and raised in Tel Aviv, Mary Ocher made the move to Berlin in 2006 with her first band Mary and the Baby Cheeses. Signing to the Klangbad label in 2016, the imprint owned by Krautrock legend Joachim Irmler from Faust, Ocher released her fifth LP The West Against the People earlier this year, alongside her every-changing backing band, The Government, produced by Irmler, the LP brings together the wild eccentricities of Ocher’s character. Cabaret overtures, dark ambient, kraut-punk, and heady poetry run throughout. The LP is accompanied by an essay of the same name, address the growing levels of xenophobia in Europe, and the nature of immigration with contemporary society. It’s a narrative that runs throughout the record, themes that extenuate Ocher’s punk-politics. “The sense of protection we have here in Europe should not be a given,” Ocher writes in Berlin paper The Exberliner. “It’s a luxury to be so removed from war and be able to make a living from music. This album was made with that knowledge in mind.”

Dubbed the ‘queen outsider of Berlin Avant-Pop’, the often outspoken, self-made Ocher is the much-needed extrinsic, independent, electro-punk-poet of our time. Alongside her music career, Ocher has also been experimenting with alternative forms of multimedia and is behind various video documentaries, and an online comedy series entitled Between Two Drummers – a take on Between Two Ferns. With an evolving style that has taken her from a performative stance of 2011’s War Songs, to this year’s more exotic, electronic-jazz LP, Ocher is not an artist to put in any kind of box. So don’t. No boxes please.