»Zwischen Zwei und Vier«: Melanie Gollin, Rosalie Ernst & Sandra Gern
Melanie Gollin, Rosalie Ernst, Sandra Gern
With their newsletter »Zwischen Zwei und Vier« and accompanying live events, Rosalie Ernst and Melanie Gollin aim for nothing less than turning audiences into better fans – or at least into listeners who pay closer attention. What initially sounds like an industry panel quickly reveals itself as a controlled loss of control: a 60-minute ride through the fault lines of the contemporary music industry, somewhere between quiz show, theory seminar, group therapy, and live podcast. The conversation moves through industry secrets, favourite songs, power structures, absurd facts, and the question of why pop culture often sounds more progressive than it actually operates.
Ernst and Gollin approach music not as a closed cultural form, but as an open system full of contradictions, desires and possibilities. It has little to do with conventional music journalism and far more with a practice that allows criticism, entertainment, and conviction to bleed into one another. Anything can happen: spontaneous lectures on the hidden mechanisms of the industry, obsessive declarations of love for pop music, quiz formats, chaos, poems, or moments of collective outrage. Raw, provocative, and fuelled by a delight in overstimulation.
»Zwischen Zwei und Vier« exists as a newsletter, podcast, and live show, and for more than five years has attempted to push back against stagnant music formats. Ernst and Gollin share an approach to pop that never separates analysis from passion. Melanie Gollin writes for publications including Musikexpress and FluxFM, focusing particularly on questions of money, labour, and justice within the music industry. Rosalie Ernst, a cultural and music scholar with a queer-feminist perspective on German pop culture, writes for outlets including tipBerlin and Missy Magazine. Together, they dissect contemporary music culture through a mixture of nerdiness, critical energy, and a pop-cultural obsession with detail.
Joining them as a guest is musician and journalist Sandra Gern. For more than a decade, she has shaped a form of music radio with her show »Chelsea Hotel« on egoFM that feels less like traditional hosting and more like a late-night conversation – an approach that has earned her, among other accolades, the German Radio Prize for »Best Programme«. Alongside this, the Berlin-based artist releases her own music under the name Polar Noir, moving between melancholic dream pop and cinematic intimacy. Her debut album was released in 2025.
