“Une teinte intense” is a beautiful tribute to one of Testbild!s greatest heroes, Isabelle Eberhardt. Excerpts from authentic diary entries and stories from Eberhardt’s travels are embedded in a dreamy sound environment in which bedouin drums and muezzin voices can be heard and where warm winds blow in the distance. The songs and pop melodies that also form the album flow like spring water in the irrigation canals. Smoke comes sweeping from the Moorish café and blue tones sparkle in the desert sand. Through the insufferable heat, the contours of an ivory white city, a mysterious oasis among the dunes, appears. Only to disappear…

Isabelle Eberhardt (born in 1877 in Geneva) was an explorer and reporter of Russian aristocratic background. She was raised as an anarchist, converted to Islam in her early twenties and set off for a long journey through the North African desert, under a male identity. She reported from her travels and covered wars in French papers, and wrote several short stories and diaries. Eberhardt was also selected to join the mystical Muslim brotherhood of Qadriyya. As a man she called herself Si Mahmoud Essadi and her anarchistic integrity and her view on love affairs and drugs made French and Swiss authorities consider her a dangerous person. In 1904, she drowned when the clay house she had rented in Aïn Sefra, Algeria, was destroyed by a flooding river.

Do you recall that rust-coloured old brick house on the abandoned site that lay next to the playground when you were a child? That neglected shack with broken windows and cracked doors, that you were strictly forbidden from playing in (but naturally did anyway)? That very house is where the new album by Testbild! was recorded. The four dream characters that make up the band have taken advantage of all the sonic singularities of the house, and adorned their surrealist pop music with humming radiators, squeaking hinges and creaking floorboards. If you keep really quiet you can hear the owls breathing in the attic and the family of bats scratching away on the walls.

This is a summer album. But it’s a summer influenced by the pictures of Edward Gorey, a summer confusing dusk with dawn. It’s music that sparkles like sun reflections on the water of ghost town canals, it’s tones from a shadow world in decay, melodies like frozen moments from a time that just maybe exists still.