Black Sea Dahu — Everything

“I wasn’t making an album. I was building a place to carry this grief” – Janine

Black Sea Dahu’s third album, Everything, wasn’t written in the usual sense. It was unearthed — patiently, painfully, from the mossy soil of grief. It wasn’t recorded in a professional studio or written in one stretch of time. Created in the aftermath of losing a parent and the years of stumbling that followed, it grew like a forest after fire.

During years of relentless touring across Europe, Janine Cathrein collected lyrical seeds and small melodic fossils. After working on these sketches in the band room for several weeks, the band gathered in the mountains in Flims, Switzerland — a village wrapped in the murmur of a forest grown on ancient debris. During spring and autumn of 2024, in a house by the edge of the woods, they built a home studio in the living room. A world of cables and tea mugs, of morning jazz jams and the occasional breakdown. 
For weeks, the band lived and breathed these songs. Friends came to cook, to hold space, to let time pass without asking questions. The place itself shaped the record. “The forest there is strange,” Janine says. “It feels alive, like it’s watching and listening.”

Paul Märki (CH) and Gavin Gardiner (CAN) joined the recording sessions and helped the songs find their final forms. They recorded the basic tracks of it live, as usual, chasing that delicate magic of imperfection: a reminder that music is a living thing, breathing through the players. It’s impossible to separate this music from the grief that birthed it. The death of Janine and Vera’s father left an invisible handprint. “Nothing ever leaves,” Janine says. “The dead stay. They live inside your voice, your hands, your dreams. Everything happens all at once.”

Musically, Everything is both stripped to the bone and magnificently alive.  The band, sharpened by years of touring, plays as one living organism. There are moments when Janine’s voice stands alone with just a guitar, trembling and unguarded; and others where a brass section rises like sunlight spilling over mountains; a clarinet sighs; strings unfurl like roots searching for air and choirs rise like sap through trees. The cinematic arrangements move like shifting weather fronts. It’s music that asks you to listen with your skin.

The songs themselves are precise windows into life’s complexity. The track Ruth is dedicated to a pigeon and the question: What makes life worth living? One Day Will Be All I Have is a tribute for her father and tries to understand how the world keeps turning when someone disappears from it. Similarly, My Dreams speaks of the loss of self within a relationship. It’s a plea for connection, for a light to find your way through the dark. Ants on the Wall is technically about the annual invasion of ants in Janine’s apartment every June, but is, in effect, talking about how there’s a point in the cycle where endings and beginnings blur. Superpower speaks to our inner children and encourages us to face our fears. Not a Man, Not a Woman is challenging conventional notions of gender and inviting a deeper understanding of personal authenticity. The title cut, Everything, follows a friend hunting chamois in the mountains while carrying the weight of losing a parent.

On The Dragon Janine sings: “I have torn at my soul to have a place in the world.” This is the album’s centerpiece, the record’s dark sun. If One Day Will Be All I Have was the wound, The Dragon is the scar. It’s a dialogue between creator and creation, a story about the violence of becoming. The dragon, as old as storytelling itself, is both monster and guardian, half myth, half mirror. It becomes the embodiment of grief’s paradox: what consumes you also forges you. It’s life re-emerging from debris. “I wrote it like a spell,” Janine says. “I think The Dragon is the part of me that survived. The part that is learning to breathe fire again.”

Sonically, it is as if the music itself is waking from a long slumber, with a string theme that tugs at your heart, swaying like firs in a storm. By the last chorus, The Dragon becomes what the title promises: a living, breathing organism of sound.

There’s an undeniable sense of rebirth running through this record. If I Am My Mother was about understanding lineage, Everything is about what remains when lineage breaks. It’s about cycles: death and renewal, solitude and connection, nature and human fragility. It’s about finding a reason to go on. It’s about how inseparable death, love and grief are. It’s about how all things, even pain, return to the same source. Nothing ever really ends; it just changes shape, just as sound becomes silence, and silence becomes song again. This record is a document of a soul learning to listen to the quiet persistence of life itself.

“In the forest, everything is quiet enough for grief to make a sound. The world keeps turning, even when you don’t. But music… music turns with you as your companion, it’s the only thing that curves to your pace.” – Janine