A Song for You: Joy Unconfined

A Song for You, a BIPOC-centred vocal ensemble based in Berlin with over fifty members, is altering the perception of choral music; harnessing the power of communal singing for unfiltered expression

Collective singing has been a vital part of the human experience since antiquity. For the members of A Song for You, there is no greater feeling of empowerment than when they come together in song. The Berlin-based BIPOC-centred vocal ensemble has spent the past two years amassing over 50 members and a grassroots following drawn to their luscious harmonies, soulful arrangements and electric live performances. “From our very first show in 2022, it’s been moving and sometimes overwhelming not just for us on stage, but for people in the audience too,” co-founder Noah Slee says. “There’s been many moments where we’ve teared up while singing and we’ve heard people crying in the crowd. It’s like the power of the voice goes beyond words. It’s deeper than the physical.”

On their debut album, Home, Slee and co-founder Dhanesh Jayaselan channel this instinctual vocal power to reach gospel ecstasy, against a backdrop of soulful melodies and jazz improvisations provided by the likes of Berlin jazz stalwart Moses Yoofee, trumpeter Theo Croker and US alt-R&B star Madison McFerrin. “We wanted to centre the experience that we have as a BIPOC collective, but rather than focus on trauma we wanted to celebrate beauty,” Jayaselan says with a smile over a video call from his Berlin home. “We didn’t want to be the version of what the world wants us to be, but just to express ourselves as we are,” Slee agrees. 

Opting for joy over pain when it comes to reflecting their lived experiences as people of colour, A Song for You’s music is warm, spacious and lush. Tracks like Beautiful evoke the idea of home – comfort, safety and space – through unfurling piano motifs and the gradual layering of vocal harmony over sweeping strings. Other numbers, like A Song for You, focus on the joy of a communal jam, interspersing ecstatic whoops within a jazz-soul instrumental. Nan’s House and Soul, meanwhile, take on a more elegiac tone, with bursts of choral harmonies and plaintive piano melodies playing out like the gut-pangs of nostalgia. “There are some songs that revolve around just one word or two lines, since that’s what felt closest to the emotion we wanted to communicate,” Slee says. “Everything on the record is us simply singing in the most authentic and unfiltered way possible.”

For Slee – who comes from a Polynesian background – singing has been an integral part of his life for as long as he can remember. While growing up in New Zealand, he would regularly take part in church services, as well as singing with the Pacific Gospel Choir and cultural performance groups, to showcase his heritage. “I would always use my voice to express myself, since it felt like a space where there were no limitations,” he says. “It’s a very Polynesian thing to think that everyone can sing – you just have to try.”

After spending much of his teens and early adulthood touring throughout the world as part of the reggae funk band Spacifix, Slee moved to Berlin in 2015 to pursue a solo career and a new musical direction encompassing soulful instrumentals and R&B harmonics. Connecting with Berlin’s alternative soul and jazz scene, which operated on the fringes of a city known as Europe’s techno capital, Slee went on to release two albums – 2017’s Otherland and 2022’s It Takes a Village. It was on a video shoot for It Takes a Village in 2021 that he first met Jayaselan. 

“When I met Dhanesh, I had been away from home for a while and was really feeling that collective singing was missing from my life,” Slee says. “We immediately connected over a shared need to build a sense of community and to showcase underrepresented voices in Berlin, outside of just electronic music and techno.” 

Raised in Australia and having lived in Berlin since 2019, Jayaselan had been working as a creative producer, helping to platform the city’s thriving improvised music scene. “My first group of friends here was the Cassette Head Sessions crew, who run this iconic weekly neo-soul, jazz and R&B jam in the tiny basement of an old DVD library,” he laughs. “It’s only 40 metres squared, but touring musicians from around the world would come through to play with local artists and it made me realise how much talent we have around us that was underused.”

After finding a shared enthusiasm for the scene with Slee, the pair began plotting ways their community project could take shape – but it was a chance encounter with a supposedly lauded work of “diverse” theatre in early 2022 that led them to settle on the idea of a BIPOC vocal ensemble. “The show was just super underwhelming and basic – it felt like such a misguided use of diverse storytelling,” Jayaselan says. “It really made us think about what we would do if we had that stage to centre our narratives. That’s when we realised we wanted to harness the power of singing; together, as one voice, telling many stories.”

The pair invited friends and artists to come and experiment with the feeling of group singing at weekly open rehearsals in small studio spaces around town. “At one of those early sessions, we sang and heard the echo of our harmony bouncing off the walls, and we all just stopped to look at each other,” Slee says, his eyes widening. “We couldn’t believe we had made such a beautiful sound with just our bodies. You can’t put those feelings into words since it’s almost spiritual, it taps into something else.”

The ensemble expanded to include diasporas from India, West Africa and beyond. Dancer and choreographer Stephanie Ilova, singer and producer Johnny Kulo, spoken word artist Sorvina Carr and singer-songwriter FAYIM are some of those who joined. Slee and Jayaselan decided to call the group A Song for You, in reference to the 1970 Leon Russell soul standard. Word began to spread: Instagram posts of their covers of tracks by artists like Frank Ocean would rack up thousands of likes within hours. “It made me think about the culture in Germany, where so many people just aren’t raised to sing like I was,” Slee says. “Once we started inviting people in, they really connected with the vulnerability of it and let go of their inhibitions. Even now, we constantly get people hitting us up asking how they can sing with us because it speaks to a need for self-expression.”

In summer 2022, 17 singers, musicians and crew from the group decamped to Limoux in southern France for a week-long residential writing and recording workshop. Taking inspiration from their diverse histories and life experiences, they began writing what would become Home. “We really tried to just enjoy the moment to ensure that whatever we came up with didn’t feel forced,” Slee says. “It was just us existing in this beautiful, luscious place and being exactly as we are.”

After returning to Berlin, the group played a sell-out debut show at the 800-capacity Volksbühne theatre. The performance produced tears on stage and in the audience. “People came up to us after the show and said it felt like it gave them a feeling they had been searching for,” Jayaselan says with a smile. “The experience of that collective voice forced them to open up and connect.”

Over the next year, Slee and Jayaselan refined and re-recorded their Limoux sessions, and invited artists they’d been working with on other projects to join in with the album-making process – including soul singers Annahstasia and duendita. “We felt like we had to give it more time to breathe and to evolve by bringing other people on board,” Jayaselan says. “At its heart, though, it’s made up of as much of Berlin’s soul and jazz scene as possible, since it is our scene and one that has had to really come up through grassroots, DIY spaces.”

It’s an inclusive choral sound the group are now ready to take far beyond Berlin’s boundaries. After sitting in on an early rehearsal, South London DJ and Rhythm Section label boss Bradley Zero was so moved by the group he decided to sign them to his tastemaking imprint. “From the moment I first heard the group, I knew I’d come across something very special,” he says. “The ensemble emanates an aura, a sort of secular spectacle that stops you in your tracks. A Song for You have tapped into something universal.”

Upcoming projects include a main stage performance at Melt Festival, a collaboration with the Beethoven Orchestra celebrating the 200th anniversary of the composer’s Missa Solemnis, and a programme with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, playing a piece inspired by the murder of civil rights activist and abolitionist Octavius Catto. 

Regardless of setting – whether in Berlin basements, symphony halls or the spaces between – A Song for You will continue to key into the ancient, vital power that is the communal voice. “It’s become this dream creative playground where we can work in these elitist spaces that people who look like us generally aren’t performing in,” Slee says. “It’s mind-blowing working on the musical side of it, and I don’t even know music theory! But to be able to portray our art authentically on every type of stage is the reason we started in the first place.”