2012
When on a late summer’s evening the sun sinks into the pink ocean down in Neukölln, when the rich Cubans turn up the bass in their white Lamborghinis, then Dan Bodan, laying in the last deck chair, dressed in a soft cardigan sipping milkshake, is humming a lonely melody into his overheated laptop. Dan calls himself a singer-songwriter. On the few tracks sparsely seeded on the internet the young Canadian is crooning his way through digital echoes like a postmodern Elvis.

2018
With an oeuvre built of rarities, guilty pleasures, and big Zeitgeist hits (Dp, Aaron, Hunger Games, Soft As Rain, …), an album on DFA Records, a leading role in Britta Thie’s online soap opera Transatlantics, and the recent ambient piano work Vacation Sounds, the Canadian digital songwriter Dan Bodan now returns to an early training ground, the Torstraßen Festival, after a six year break. Back then we described him as a postmodern Elvis (no big deal); at times, amongst Berlin’s underground and expat institutions Times Bar (RIP), Chester’s (RIP), and New Theater (RIP), Dan Bodan has been understood as bigger than Elvis. In any case, he has carved out a highly individual, ever-compelling, complex, touching, sometimes-contradictory, and not-infrequently-misunderstood musical niche for himself. As a songwriter with digital means, Bodan uses his music to map the transition from reality TV via virtual reality back to actual reality, from modern to post-modern to this crazy little thing called IRL. As in: the self, the relationships between humans, fundamentals, big feelings, eternal emotions. Dan Bodan FOREVER? The author of this biography must reveal that Bodan’s songs of then and now always bring goosebumps, and this physiological reaction can only be due to the apparent unity of calculated technology and human empathy/emotionalism, a form of reverse singularity, a unification of now and eternity—the very rare, near-impossible art of melting the spirit of the times and the immutable down into a common denominator. In the Grüner Salon, Bodan will present a new work called “SLUM”, a song cycle of contemporary chamber music originally commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale and developed during various residencies in Tehran, Tokyo, and Athens.

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