Laura Rafetseder - Driven Creatures (2019)

Laura Rafetseder loves digging and diving deep. After swimming in the arctic sea (her album in 2016) she moves her attention to the inner oceans. On the bottom of those inner seas you can find burning fires spread by the wind as well as shadows in the dark (fire at the bottom of the ocean). But it's not only the fire that drives us and the depth that draws us towards it - we are also beasts of prey kept in cages (running wild) and dark butterflies (dark butterfly).

Modern life is complicated - online-dating opens a never ending flood of possibilities. The classic family model seems to work less and less, more and more people start looking for new forms of relationships - and clash with the boundaries of society. We are driven, but society tries to control us with do's and don't's instead of enabling us to find out who we really are and want to be.

Laura Rafetseder asks once more what love after capitalism could be like - in a society free of women's oppression, drive for profits and the economic chains that keep us from living the lives we want to live. Female sexuality is being reduced to a commodity. Women are punished if they cross the narrow limitations accepted by society by being who they are. How dangerous is it to expose yourself as a woman? How dangerous is it to show female desire? How do we protect ourselves from unwanted responses? Love after capitalism - it might be more elusive and we might be confronted with downsides, but without the violent side effects of class society.

The songs on driven creatures were the result of 3 years of online-dating, with ups and downs, meeting interesting people, falling in and out of love, making music, love and new friends - in short, a journey to oneself (fire at the bottom of the ocean). These are songs of desire, failure and excitement, but also uncertainty (what will it be). Because what will we find if we dive down to the bottom of the ocean? Nothing but ourselves (the inner sea). Loving yourself is not as easy as it sounds.

“What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than what they really want. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual – and that will be the end of it.”
Friedrich Engels, origin of the family