An old piano with ivory keys. A little girl who unperturbedly plays melodies with tender fingers. At the age of three, they are those of her environment, the sounds of her Russian childhood. When her ambitious piano lessons start at the age of six, she begins to hear more and more of her own melodies in her head. They demand to be let out. Encouraged and coached as an exceptionally gifted child, the little girl with the shy eyes wins one competition after another in Belarus; a junior scholarship at the academy of music follows when she is nine. Her success at music competitions continues in Germany. But they don't seem to satisfy her hunger for the sounds in her own soul. Her big eyes are still shy, despite her music courses at the academy. Her place at the piano is her fate, her fulfilment, the place of her metamorphosis. At the keyboard of her piano, she feels powerful and powerless at the same time: Leandra.
"To me, the piano is an escape from the outside world, a type of communication that starts where others stop," says the passionate artist, who speaks five languages. There is no communicaton barrier in her life. She loves tearing down borders, musically and in terms of language, caressing and at the same time unsettling her audience with the call of her blood, which she turns into sounds and words. Having made a name for herself on the scene as the erotic keyboard predator, Ophelia Dax of Jesus On Extasy, the beautiful thoroughbred musician is now getting ready to seduce our ears with her solo project. In contrast to Ophelia, Leandra is that person in her who marvels at the world all by herself. Unabashedly avant-garde on the one hand and sensuously earthed on the other, Leandra devotedly sets about transforming her musical heartbeat. "Metamorphine" is a sonic document of her fragile striving for change and challenge. Accompanied by her six cats, Leandra refuses to surrender to every-day life, to a stagnation of the productivity of her own imagination. Hearing the wooden floor creak under her bare feet, breathing in loneliness and calling the spirits with her piano – that's what makes her happy.
"Leandra's songs are a selection of impressions experienced and captured exclusively in extreme situations. These songs are practically an electroencephalogram of such moments, a secret diary," she explains. "Metamorphine" is her attempt to make audible and also visible the leitmotif of her chosen path. Unpredictable like a cat, she demands total attention and uncompromising loyalty from the people that surround her, as the photo-artistic translation of her booklet proves. Leandra's visions are legion, and nothing is left to coincidence when this confident artiste works on translating them into art. Boldly, Leandra operates in a sphere somewhere between Tori Amos and Emily the Strange. Reliable categorisations excluded.
"Change is the only constant in my life, which explains the diversity of my songs. 'Angeldaemon' and '‚Lie To Me', for example, are dedicated to a person who really inspired me; these songs are about an unusually painful separation, because this man acted as a kind of catalyst for me. 'Noisy Awareness' is devoted to a stalker who cost me two years of my life, and 'Inverted Mirrors Of Decay' is based on a fable in which I find myself a wreck. 'Tyberi Folla' describes two astral beings whose story I just couldn't seem to fit into words, which is why I relied on my own fantasy language," explains Leandra, who brings to mind early Mila Mar because of this last detail. No less mysteriously, she refers to "The Art Of Dreaming", a song which she recorded with Sven Friedrich (Zeraphine / Dreadful Shadows). Having met Sven in a dream, this spiritual journey inspired Leandra to invite Sven to record this velvety duet with her.
To Leandra, the moment of dialogue is also a visual concept which she also wants to act out on stage. Flowing fabrics and haunting projections – a theatre play made up of abstraction. She gathered initial experience in this field with Rya, supporting Letzte Instanz, with whom she still has a cordial relationship and whose "Das weisse Lied" tour she will grace in spring 2008, despite the release of "Metamorphine" on 22 February. Leandra knows no fear of major stages. "The stage is the only place where my communication with the world out there works perfectly, without me going off the rails due to a sensory overload!" She lowers her eyes and listens within. Her clothes fall to the ground, and with her red blindfold she is suddenly back at the piano. The sonic power of the unspeakable has her back in its grip.
