Santrra Oxyd

Santrra Oxyd (real name: Sandra Herbener ; born July 23, 1961 in Konstanz ) is a German musician whose musical style is characterized by punk and Tibetan folklore .

biography

At the age of 14 she left her family and moved to Freiburg and from the early 1980s to Berlin. There she attended school, worked in a health food store and was a groupie at DAF and the Einstürzende Neubauten . From around 1983 she herself appeared as a musician. She had contact with the drug scene at an early age and was a drug addict until 1982. In 1986 she was ordained as a Zen nun. In the same year she tore her brain membrane in a bicycle accident, performed regularly with her accordion, but otherwise withdrew from the public eye. In 1993 she suffered a herniated disc and, after dreaming about the Dalai Lama , decided to travel to Dharmshala in India after her recovery . From 1994 she traveled to Asia several times, including Dharmshala, where she actually met the Dalai Lama. There she met her future husband Ngawang Gelek, a Tibetan lama and exile, who lived there as a hermit monk after a three-year prison term following a demonstration by Tibetan monks against the Chinese occupation. Gelek gave up his celibacy and married Sandra Herbener, who as a Zen nun was not celibate. They moved to Germany together, where shortly afterwards, in July 1995, their daughter Tara Tenzin Namdröl was born. The unusual marriage, which became the subject of a documentary, divorced in 2003.

music

Santrra Oxyd began her musical career with an unconventional style that is close to punk rock . However, she used an accordion as a defining (and later only) instrument, which occasionally leads to a public perception as a “German chanson singer”. Her singing and partly her music is compared to Nico again and again . This unusual combination quickly gave her a reputation in the Berlin subculture. First she performed under the pseudonym Atropa Belladonna without a record deal and management. In 1983 she joined the band Die Haut , from which she separated again a few months later. In 1984 she became a member of the punk band Mannamaschine , to which she gave a characteristic appearance through her accordion play and her striking voice. There was also a joint project with Frieder Butzmann . Like him, Santrra is also occasionally counted among the so-called Geniale Dilletanten . She had her first solo appearance (initially as Santrra ) in 1985 at Café Swing. She became known nationwide primarily through her appearance at the Berlin Atonal -Festival. From 1986 concerts all over Germany followed. A concert in Potsdam was filmed by ZDF. Further appearances took place at the documenta in Kassel and at a John Peel session in the Bochum colliery. Several television appearances followed and the SFB shot a portrait of her.

After several years of compulsory pause due to health problems and trips to Asia, it began to occur more frequently from 1996 onwards. She devoted herself to Tibetan folklore, which she often plays with her husband. Many of the performances took place as part of fundraising events for Tibet and other Asian topics.

She began to write her memoirs in 2003: Sex, Drugs, Punk and Beyond Tibet, memoirs of a Berlin Zen nun , but after graduating two years later, she couldn't find a publisher for it. Then she went back to her musical roots, composed new songs, learned to deal with the accordion a little more professionally and from May 2008 appeared either with her own songs solo or with Tibetan songs with ex-husband Tschaglung Tulku Ngawang Gelek.

Further appearances

In addition to her career as a musician, there were always other appearances. At the age of 15, she appeared as a model for charity stamps for Deutsche Post. In 1995 she posed as a model, heavily pregnant, naked in front of the Berlin Reichstag, veiled by Christo and Jeanne-Claude .

In 1985 she played theater. She took on the role of Cordelia in King Lear . The piece was performed in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien .

In the late 1980s she worked as a presenter for Radio 100 .

From the end of the 1990s she appeared on several talk shows on German television on the subject of drugs, in which she reported on her addiction and withdrawal.

From 1999 the director Solveig Klaßen filmed the unusual love story Santrra with Ngawang Gelek. The film Jenseits von Tibet was a co-production with the German Film and Television Academy Berlin on behalf of ZDF in cooperation with Arte. He has received several awards ( The Young Lion Bavarian Documentary Film Prize; Prize of the Youth Jury, International Documentary Film Prize Leipzig; Special Prize of the Jury, Film Festival Graz; Nomination for VPRO Joris Ivens Award , Amsterdam; Predicate: particularly valuable).

Discography

• Santrra .. and nobody else (RebelRecords / SPV, 1984)
• Oxyd ( Zensor , 1986)
• Aglowing Ambrosia (Oxyd Vers.) On poverty satisfies hunger (Gentle & Courageous Prod., 1986)
• King and Queen (censor, 1987; English version: King & Queen )
• unpublished live-recording (self-distribution, 1993)
• Beyond Tibet (Self-Distributed, 2001)
• live in the kitchen (recording of a radio special from Radio-Z in Fürth, 2006)

Other publications

• Beyond Tibet (film, 2000)
• Sex, drugs, punk and "Beyond Tibet" - memoirs by a Berlin Zen nun (book, 2007)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Spex 4/87
2. ↑ The taz of February 21, 1985 writes: "She seems to be a mixture of Nena, Marlene Dietrich, and Johnny Rotten"
3. ↑ Discogs entry Poverty satisfies hunger

Web links

• MySpace page