Introducing Güner Künier: Berlin’s synthpunk pugilist doing things her way
In the rich and storied heritage of Berlin’s post-punk and electronic constellations, it takes serious gumption and some punching above one’s weight to enter the old Prussian city’s alternative underground and manage to stick out from the leather-clad crowd.
In a surge that rivals any of its Neue Deutsche Welle explosion over 40 years earlier, the cohort of electronic punks operating in 2020s Berlin’s vibrant subterranean found an unlikely force in Güner Künier. It was a surprise even to herself. Despite playing guitar in bands as early as 13, a U-turn to a master’s level path in economics and engineering, followed by related work, was suddenly upended by the arts’ beckoning to Germany’s famous capital.
“I didn’t plan it,” Künier recalls to Far Out on her distinct path to alternative music. “I was not like, ‘OK, I’m going to do post punk or synth wave or anything. “I just did what I do and what I like, and this is what came out.”
‘What came out’ is a beguiling brew of synthpunk skulk and cavernous club thump, all draped in a colourful wry smirk. 2022’s debut Aşk dwelled in chillier pools of lo-fi minimalism, but Künier’s taste for brawny drum machines and meaty basslines found a more fitting foil for last year’s follow-up Yaramaz, expanding her unmistakable crackle of impish rebelliousness for an album that swung its electro fists with gleeful clout. Turkish for “little know-it-all”, Künier’s birth in Izmir sowed fruitful creative seeds for later artistic paths she’d follow.
“I stayed there until I was three years old, and then my parents came to Germany, but I was still in Turkish communities,” Künier reflects on her heritage. “It took a while until I got out of this. So I got the whole time this influence.”
Early exposure to old Turkish rock and pop records would then point the way to punk, completely at odds with her community. “I didn’t feel I belonged. So I pushed it away for a long time for my identity and for myself.”
Such an intuition for what’s beyond the horizon would eventually compel Künier on the long road to Berlin’s electronic fringes. Having abandoned her engineering ambitions, an immersion in the punk scene and playing in bands triggered the confidence to begin working with synths and programming. Given further support from fellow Berlin synthpunker Cosey Mueller from Das Das and Glaas along the way, her two albums have sharpened their electronic garage attack to a new single, ‘Kes’, brimming with a gleaming pugnaciousness.
“Right now, it’s like this empowering thing that is going on,” Künier reflects on ‘Kes’ and the upcoming album’s creative direction.
“Like my everyday fight that I have to fight, that I live this life the way I do. Not like family or personal, but more in a society or community way.”
Güner Künier
An eye on the outside tumult affecting us all zaps and fires off of ‘Kes’ punch-drunk fever. Buoyed with a Crash Bandicoot donk beat, twangy guitar licks, and industrial blasts of hissing seethe, Künier takes aim at the choking neoliberal world with the aid of director Magnus Krueger’s hectic green screen video, featuring both Künier and Mueller avoiding lightning strikes and explosions, working up a sweat in the hyper-productive grindset hellscape that’s contemporary Berlin as much as the Western world.
The road may have been long and unexpected, but from ‘Kes’ electrical fire in its belly, it sounds like Künier’s just getting started. “I’m committing myself so much to these decisions I made, how to live my life and also to art and music, and I don’t feel insecure about it anymore,” she asserts on the album’s next chapter.
“I feel a strength in it…I feel more confident in the way I do music now because I know what I want to do.”
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