Musicians who have been struggling for years for success, who have to play as afternoon acts at festivals in Central Germany in front of ten dozing party corpses or as support for irrelevant indie bands against the clinking of beer glasses – all these soldiers of fortune should feel completely fooled, should they ever on the Wikipedia page by Domiziana Gibbels get lost “In February 2022, she signed a record deal with the music label Four Music,” it says. “On March 4th, 2022 their first single ‘Ohne Benzin’ was released. A music video appeared on YouTube the same day. At the end of May 2022, the song entered the German single charts at number eight and reached number one on June 17, 2022.”
What happened to Domiziana, as Gibbels calls himself (even at the risk of sounding like a “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” candidate from 2003) – in just three months? It’s TikTok, stupid. Sure, the dance-pop song “Ohne Benzin” is quite a hit, if only because of the video in which Domiziana twirls around on a motorcycle. The career of the Freiburg-born, trained Sicilian and now Berliner only really got going when “Ohne Benzin” appeared in dance challenges on TikTok – at 1.1 times the speed.
@iam.domiziana drop remix??? @marekderking thank u for making me realise #gasoline #berlinaesthetic #domiziana #to you #berlintechno #Berlin #for you ♬ Without petrol (1.1x speed version) – Domiziana
Slightly accelerated, Domiziana’s voice sounds helium-like and extraterrestrial, the beat hyperactive: after hyperpop, the genre that has been countering the slow-motion pop of the ten-year queens, Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey, for some time with hyperexcitement and high-speed. Twelve years ago, the US producer Nick Pittsinger became an internet phenomenon with the trick of cooking Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” in a 800x slowed down version into a spooky witch house piece for the acceleration-weary world. Now, after years of Corona stagnation, artists like Domiziana are pitching themselves to high-speed success with Hyperpop. Even if three months to 1st place in their calendar are certainly an eternity.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 09/2022.