When asked how to sum up their music they normally respond with some sort of juxtaposition: “decadence and decay” or “melancholy disco”, but ultimately they say, if you strip away all the smug adjectives, it’s really just pop. London duo Woman E, who are confusingly made up of London born Ria Berlin and Berlin born OoverMatic, decided 3 years ago to put something back into pop music that seemed to have gone missing over the years: a point of view. “We thought it was dull how pop music rarely dealt with anything but lyrical clichés and that it was missing out on the opportunity to be subversive. Subversion is not the prerogative of guys with guitars or people who shout a lot” And so they stumbled into their first juxtaposition: subversive pop. OoverMatic, who had cut his teeth as musical director of fashion uber-icon Comme des Garçon, says he learned there how friction is the strongest creative fuel. “It’s easy to put two things of a kind together, but when you can make something coherent out of opposites then you have created something amazing.” “Yes,” says Ria, “but it’s just as important to never make a pompous statement like that!” They laugh, but it feels that they themselves are not two of a kind but an embodiment of a strong creative friction. Both coming from different musical backgrounds, Ria Berlin with an admiration for strong female vocalists like Kate Bush or Bjørk and OoverMatic with Kraftwerk & disco in his blood and a Leonard Cohen obsession, they meet somewhere between electronica, high energy and nihilistic ballads. “We are committed to being entertaining before anything else and are not afraid of big choruses. Lyrically it can get a little serious sometimes, even if you don’t notice it straight away. It is pop with a point of view”. “Yes”, Ria pauses and thinks for a few seconds; then she says smirkingly, “when we dance, we really mean it.”
