Rotem Geffen - Angel/Monster (Demo version 2023.03.10) DL

The demo of „Angel/Monster" was recorded as a voice memo—raw and unfiltered. It is confrontational, cutting sharply between moments of determination, despair, longing, and fury. 
 
Nelly Klayman-Cohen’s voice climbs and dives unpredictably, low and intimate one moment, searing and urgent the next, tangled with double bass (Vilhelm Bromander), synth layers (Milton Öhrström), and her relentless hammering piano. The song refuses to resolve; it haunts, bruises, insists. 

The lyrics of Angel/Monster contains an altered quote from Toni Morrisson's character Valerian.

“It must be something else. (…) 
This is not life. This is some other thing. (…) 
Until his heart, revivified, pumped its way along for a single purpose: to spill out of his eyes throughout the millennia he would have to live.”

The song also contains a musical quote: a fragment of a melody written by Nelly’s friend Göran Lind, from a piece he once gave her to play on the piano. 

Biography

Singer, pianist and composer Nelly Klayman-Cohen, who performs under the name Rotem Geffen, conjures up a dream world that is both refined and raw. Her last album The Night is the Night (2024) was the follow-up to the debut You Guard the Key. Written in German, English and Hebrew, the lyrics explored ideas of memory, love and grief, but also a kind of poetics of the night. The album received worldwide praise. The Arts Desk (UK), for instance, wrote: “These songs are delicate but sturdy, fragile chamber pop touched with a modern classical seriousness that, happily, doesn’t stifle their easy flightiness”; while Freq (UK) wrote of the album that “[it] is a delightful collection of doomed romance delivered in a way that finds you holding your breath in anticipation.
Rotem Geffen have performed solo and in various constellations at major venues in Sweden and festivals such as Way Out West.