Magic Island - So Wrong Vinyl

Berlin’s uncrowned Queen of Pop: Magic Island opens the doors to her world. Virtually – and physically.

Berlin’s Neukölln is so much more than a borough or a neighbourhood. It has become a symbol – for supposed social issues, for the new chapter in the history of the once-divided city that is both open to the world and hidden from it at the same time, cosmopolitan and yet oh so very Berlin. And right in the middle of it stands Emma Czerny, better known as Magic Island. Since her EP debut she has been reigning over the underground pop scene of the city, with songs that seem as intimate and vulnerable as they are artistically intricate, carrying both a love for pop music in them as well as experimental lo-fi and a great love for the r’n’b sound of the Nineties. 

With her second album, SO WRONG, Magic Island is realizing her artistic vision more radical than ever, opening the door to her universe: she is creating a fully immersive world in which the listeners can dive – merging the virtual with the physical. QR-Codes attached to walls throughout her beloved neighbourhood in Berlin open virtual portals to enter the reality Magic Island, her friends and collaborators create. “SO WRONG is the first fragmented album. It’s rooted in Neukölln but all the parts come from people in the community” she explains. SO WRONG goes beyond the soundscape of Magic Island’s hypnotic compositions and expands into a 360 degree experience, capturing this unique way of life between Sonnenallee and Karl-Marx-Straße, between growing up and yet another trippy night.

It is precisely these contradictions that SO WRONG thrives on, the songs striking the balance between lightness and hopelessness, dealing with love and depression, anxiety and self-empowerment. Magic Island ponders about how meanings shift throughout time, and about the neverending search for purpose in our own lives. But at the same time, she draws this intimate portrayal of a street corner on Weichselstraße, between a fancy bar, a music studio and a bodega with a curiously broad selection of cereals, and sings about relationships to friends and drug dealers on the corner, all during the first wave of lockdowns in Europa, as it suddenly grew very quiet on the streets of bustling Neukölln where usually different lifestyle exist in parallel, without ever colliding.

For SO WRONG, Czerny – who usually favours recording her lo-fi songs in her own bedroom – decided to work with a producer: “I started to get more and more involved with the German rap scene and I thought maybe I need someone who’s rally good at producing sick beats.” That someone turned out to be Phong Ho, known in German underground rap circles. And coincidentally, his studio turned out to be located very close to Czerny’s home. When the pandemic hit Berlin in the spring of 2020, they started to work on song sketches during nightly sessions in the studio. It is these sketches that slowly started to develop into SO WRONG, sketches that clearly take the shape of a type of pop music, but are rooted in soul and golden era r’n’b, in Westcoast hip hop and ultracontemporary hyper pop. Czerny: “Phong and I had a similar reference point in music, a lot of old school hiphop, and we just started to work every night.”

The result is an album showcasing a diverse range of sounds and references – held together by Magic Island’s inimitable voice and storytelling: “My voice is more amplified than ever, and not ashamed of that at all. The vocals are at the heart of the power of the tracks”, Czerny says. “But there is also this ethereal element of deep and melodically rich soundscapes in every song, we’ve created old school beats, but in a Magic Island way, with a magical ethereal soundscape.” 

This is particularly pronounced in the title track, So Wrong. Czerny’s voice reverberates through a foggy space, desire, desperation and lethargy coalesce irresistibly into a “classic love song”, as Magic Island describes it herself. It is a meditation about the impossibility of letting a loved one go: “This is about loss and the darkness that follows, no way of seeing the light. It perfectly embodies one side of the two attitudes of the album, that of love and loss vs. that of empowerment and self-sufficiency.” It is not a coincidence that this was the first piece Phong Ho and Czerny worked on together and it clearly set the scene for all that was to follow.

Bury Me Alive opens in a similarly ethereal way, only to introduce ultracontemporary trap elements as an antipode to Czerny’s soul-filled voice and drag the song into a different, almost apocalyptical direction. Which fits quite well to Magic Island’s lyrics: “I wrote this about my angst with the current global climate, about poverty, police brutality and how political unrest reaches the point of revolution.”

But it is not all grim and gloomy on the magical island: mirroring So Wrong, So Right evokes memories of sensual and self-confident Nineties r’n’b. Hook and chorus roll out of the speakers slowly like thick hony syrup. But instead of sweet-talking a lover, So Right turns into an ode to female self-empowerment: “This track shows the other side of the first single ‘So Wrong’ – instead of lamenting, suffering over a moment in time, accepting things exactly as they are in the present and being satisfied with yourself”, Czerny says about the track that almost seamlessly rolls into the confident hymn GiveNTake.

With SO WRONG, Magic Island has created a total, an all-encompassing and all embracing piece of art, disrupting genre limitations as well as boundaries between different artistic disciplines. Is it music? Is it media art? Community art? Or all of it at the same time? Most of all, it is an declaration of love. To Neukölln, to female self-confidence, and to uncondictional faith in one’s own vision. “Step into our world”, Magic Island asks us in the intro to SO WRONG. An invitation none of us should reject.