NICA live: Rebekka Salomea presents Cheap Wedding & Philo Tsoungui Solo

NICA live not only brings the music and projects of the NICA artists themselves to the stage, but also musicians and bands who appreciate them and would like to bring them to a local audience. Rebekka Salomea - NICA artist 2022 - is bringing Cheap Wedding and Philo Tsoungui to Cologne this summer evening.

Behind the artistic persona of Cheap Wedding is musician Ann Weller, who began her career as a classical pianist, playing in bands and composing film music before feeling ready to forge a new creative identity for herself. Cheap Wedding draws on a wide range of influences including trip-hop, eighties pop, James Blake, Leonard Cohen, Tirzah and FKA Twigs. Cheap Wedding succeeds in creating bedroom pop that is as intimate as it is pleasantly quirky: perfect for daydreaming and letting yourself go. Nothing about Cheap Wedding is "cheap", apart perhaps from the bridal veil that the artist likes to wear.

Philo Tsoungui is a drummer, composer, producer and video artist. As an ensemble member and solo artist, Philo has performed in venues between the West Coast of the USA and Hong Kong, Oslo and Cairo. After studying classical percussion and timpani, Philo went on to study the jazz drum set, which heralded the transition to popular music. Most recently, Philo toured the world with the US band The Mars Volta. As a producer and composer, Philo accepts commissions and also appears regularly as a soloist. A wide range of experiences, coupled with growing up in a Cameroonian-influenced household, are crucial to the unique blend of different art forms and sounds that characterize Philo's art. The boundaries between genres are non-existent, rules are internalized to be broken. The great love for classical music in all its facets and spiritual Cameroonian music meets the fascination for electronic soundscapes and technically innovative implementation possibilities. Artistic projects are always understood as an interdisciplinary whole that stimulates all the senses equally.