Odd Beholder — Thank You For Shopping With Us

Odd Beholder, the electro-wave/indie pop project by Swiss musician Daniela Weinmann, is expanding her current concept album "Honest Work" with six more tracks, and will release the EP "Funny Business" this autumn. "Thank You For Shopping With Us" will be released as the first single from the EP on August 21st,  2026.

This driving Indietronica track explores a sense of disorientation in consumer society. Told from the perspective of a supermarket employee, it highlights the various roles this person is forced to take on – from bouncer to social worker, and, of course, ultimately, sales assistant.

Weinmann explains: "When public spaces shrink, or when pandemics make gatherings impossible, when older people flee the heatwave to air-conditioned shopping centres, it is the supermarket, of all places, that becomes a refuge where everything seems to stay the same."

The track is inspired by Alan Ginsberg’s poem "A Supermarket in California". "Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?" The whole world is laid out on the shelves. And all the seasons at once: the pumpkins alongside the strawberries.

Weinmann continues: "I imagined a mad prophet, à la Moon Dog, wandering aimlessly through the aisles and being approached by the sales staff – seemingly friendly, eager to help, subservient, but in reality controlling, exclusionary, weighing up the risks. Soon the security guards are called: the elderly, the mad, the homeless and the sick are thrown out of this neon paradise. Everything is for sale; even all the people here are commodities. Outside, there’s nothing but summer and rubbish. Inside, there’s ice cream and plastic cutlery."

The ‘B-side’ of the double single is the dreamy "Dreaming Water", a collaboration with Leipzig-based musician Markus Rom.

Any exploration of work as a topic cannot ignore artificial intelligence. "Dreaming Water" is, in the broadest sense, written by machines and robots. Rom composes the beat for the song using kinetic MIDI robots. The unusual harmonies, in turn, originate from the Arca Musarithmica of 1650, a composition algorithm devised by the Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher, who is regarded as one of the first inventors of artificial creativity.

Weinmann chose not to use modern LLMs or Suno. On the one hand, this was to highlight that the idea of a composition robot has been around for a long time. But it was also, quite simply, to save water. In the lyrics, she describes humanity as ‘dreaming water’, alluding to the fact that we are depriving ourselves of the very foundations of life if we continue to rely on the enormous consumption of energy and water involved in building new data centres.

"Dreaming Water" is a Beatles-esque, baroque-inspired hymn to the biological foundations of humanity and a call for solidarity amongst water-based beings against the machines.