Who is Marilies Jagsch? With the debut album I AM of her new project MAIIJA, the musician provides us with an answer that raises many questions while exploring the zeitgeist. “I am not who you think I am. I could be anyone”, states the accompanying text of the album. On the cover: a barely recognizable face. The self introducing itself here is interchangeable, it slips into various roles and acquires different meanings depending on the perspective. The stories told on I AM take a glimpse behind the scenes of the superficial representations that accompany our everyday lives. They revolve around how the demands of our achievement-oriented society inscribe themselves onto the individual, the struggle against the structures we learn from an early age, the attempt to break free from them, the failure to do so, and how this failure interferes with our lives and our relationships with others.

For her current project Marilies Jagsch teamed up with producer Peter Paul Aufreiter (Hearts Hearts) and invited some of Vienna’s most exciting musicians such as Lukas Lauermann (cello), Emily Stewart (violin) or Gernot Scheithauer (drums) to record the eleven tracks of the album I AM, that was released on Noise Appeal Records in September 2023.