Who is this Luis Ake anyway? Does anyone know? Does he even know himself? Or does it perhaps not even matter? Since Ake's debut "Bitte Lass Mich Frei" in 2019 has recalibrated what pop can mean in German, nothing is the same anymore. Synth pop and dark wave meet Italo disco and NDW, Pet Shop Boys dance with Enigma, Grönemeyer shakes hands with OMD, and above it all H. P. Baxxter sits enthroned and rains down a trance storm. "Pop music for me is an art form that is not exclusively about music," says Luis Ake. No, pop, for Ake, is more, so much more. He pushes clichés of masculinity to the extreme and turns them into their opposite, while living as a nomad between Berlin and the French hinterland, he keeps pulling new songs out of the trunk of his old Porsche, with which he holds up a distorted fairground mirror to society.