ATKA Releases Debut EP 'The Eye Against The Ashen Sky'

Atka has released her debut EP The Eye Against the Ashen Sky. The EP, already receiving attention from New York Times, Paste Magazine, and FLOOD Magazine for singles “Eye in the Sky,” “Desiring Machines” and “Lenny” is the work of Sarah Neumann.

The tracks were produced primarily with modular and analogue synthesizers and guitars in the South-London home studio of Jung Kim, the lead guitarist of the band Gang of Youths and Stephen Sedgwick, the trusted mixer/sound engineer of the Gorillaz, Damon Albarn and Blur mixed the record. 

Neumann wrote The Eye Against The Ashen Sky last year in London parallel to completing her master's degree in philosophy, in which she intensively studied the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre's, theory of the gaze. Inspired by her research, as well as Nabokov's novel "The Eye" and various works of utopian science-fiction, the EP documents a world of paranoia, where the gaze of an overwhelming otherness is ever-present.

Although Atka has been writing, producing and recording her own music for years, she has so far remained in the background of the music industry. Growing up in a tiny village in Germany, she moved to the beaches of the Gold Coast in Australia at the age of 15 and later to the snowy mountains in Squamish, Canada, before finding a home in London.

Initially pursuing a career in sustainability research and politics, Atka quickly became disillusioned by the bureaucracy of the political system and instead considered going into filmmaking. A few self-directed short films, runner- and costume assistant jobs later, she however returned to music as a journalist for Rolling Stone, Groove and Musikexpress and others. With her own sound however, she has only been tinkering in private – whether on her walks through St. James Park to procrastinate writing her master's thesis, on the tube on the way to Soho or in her improvised home studio in East London.

Atka comes up with ideas mostly when she is on the move. Incorporating that constant movement into her music, she wants her songs to create a cinematic feel – or how she describes it: to be “journey-esque.” A versatile musician who cites Joy Division and Kraftwerk as her most formative influences, she wrote her first song at the age of ten and later gained the attention of big names in the music scene for her poetic lyrics and unique flair for music production and composition.

On the EP Atka's intellectual interests and personal experiences blur into an autobiographical work about shame and paranoia. Track after track, The Eye Against The Ashen Sky meanders deeper and deeper through various manifestations of these emotional worlds to their origin in the gaze:

"On the one hand, being perceived is in itself a life-affirming thing, because the recognition by an Other confirms that I exist. On the other hand it is life-denying or threatening, due to the fact that in the perception of the other I always become an object - a static thing in the world, which is the opposite of what I am. The record is largely about this dichotomy. It is a gaze back at the gaze – hence the title The Eye Against the Ashen Sky"

Photo Credit: JSD