Are you a Tree Frog?
New Cologne post-Techno dribbles and drabbles
Original position in magazine: pages 41-42
Contents: Schlammpeitziger, Schlammpeitziger remixed, L@N
Schlammpeitziger
Freundlichbaracudamelodieliedgut
GERMANY A-MUSIK A2 MINI LP (1996)
Nobody in their right mind could resist these engaging synth melodies and friendly beats, quite the converse of some harsh, repellent techno. It may not be particularly novel or challenging, and it does resemble early Kraftwerk, but neither are hangable offences. The end of side A has pastoral sound effects very like Kraftwerk’s ‘Morgenspaziergang’ from 1974. The young creator responsible for these noises is: Jo! Besides running the A-Musik mail-order shop in Cologne, Jo is very keen on fish. That’s probably him on the cover, looking extremely ungainly as he stands on the beach holding an enormous barracuda in his arms. This charming picture alone is worth your money, it’s a holiday snap; a man not trying to sell you some phoney, contrived, mysterious image is a man you can trust, an assurance further confirmed by the small-press ‘art school’ way these limited edition LP sleeves have been assembled (one of six different photo prints glued onto art paper, xeroxed text). I also like his dry sense of humour in the lyric ‘This beat is dynamic…this beat makes you think, because baby…your love stinks’, delivered flat and emotionless in what I take to be an apt parody of dance floor vacuity. The long LP title I think unpacks into something about friendly fish, melodies and good songs. As was recently pointed out to me, UK newsagents are now filled with more Fishing magazines than anything else. Carp has become the pitbull terrier of fish, a popular ’sporting’ catch among UK working class men (salmon and trout are for your upper class nobs). More and more flyposter adverts for dance records use fish. There’s a picture of Beck wearing a fishing hat in the October 97 ish of Mojo. What do these people know? Quite clearly, fish have the answer to the future. Invest in a tank of tropical finny friends, and play this LP as they swim aimlessly about.
ED PINSENT
Schlammpeitziger
Freundlichbaracudaremix
GERMANY A-MUSIK A6 MINI LP (1996)
A 10″ LP with four remixes of tracks from the above album, by the well-known Mouse on Mars, Jo’s buddy Felix aka FX Randomiz, Marcus Schmickler and Sweet Reinhard. Both Mouse on Mars and Randomiz do little more than add rhythm tracks of queasy bleepy-bloopy beats and wobble the synthie melodies cutely, while Schmickler’s version of ‘Eine Wolke im Wald’ is a moment of sheer translucent radiance, as relaxing as a hot bath. Reinhard is into somewhat fancier effects, with his backwards tapes, loops and dubbish mixing. Only Schmickler can be said to actually make the music progress at all - the others pretty much just get into a groove and stay there, but this is still a hot little item and a real winner. The picture of Jo with his barracuda has now been invaded by single-molecule nasties resembling protozoa.
Schmickler works in his ‘Kasper-Hausar Studios’ in Cologne; these Cologne musicians, enjoying something of a hermetically sealed artistic life, are reaping the spiritual inheritance of the character Kaspar Hauser, whose troubling Enigma was explored in one of Werner Herzog’s best films from the so-called New German Cinema scene of the 1970s, and one of the few not to have music by Popul Vuh. ‘Can’t you hear the terrible screaming all around us, the screaming that men call silence?’ is the opening text of this movie, and that’s surely an axiom that these musicians live by. Kaspar Hauser’s story is based on an old idiot-savant legend, the man is kept in a cellar until he reaches adulthood and then let loose in the world. He proceeds to confound the rational Enlightenment-age men around him with his logic-defeating observations. A child-like enfant sauvage who stands on the verge of communicating a new understanding of the world. But the rational men win, and detirmined to understand what makes him tick, they trepan his corpse at the end and by examining his brain, mistakenly think they can figure out what makes him tick. This film is also known by the German title which translates as ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’. Much as I love this film, the message behind it is a decidedly Romantic hymn to the human spirit which verges on being naive and sentimental. How far do our Cologne friends align themselves with such disingenuousness?
ED PINSENT
L@N
L@N
GERMANY A-MUSIK A4 LP (1996)
A stripped down minimalist affair, episodes in digital noise over beats which are sometimes simply woodblock click tracks, a bass throb and an extremely clipped high hat sound, ingeniously assembled to resist syncopation - the second you spot a pattern, it vanishes. Occasionally, timid and thin-sounding electronic blips or barely-manipulated synthblasts disrupt the monotony; now and again a pitch or note is arrived at, mostly hinted at by negative shapes. The listener is strapped into a mechanical hammock with leather bonds, while little Munchkin men swing you back and forth. This art-techno is just the sort of thing to numb your brain to sleep if conventional painkillers aren’t doing the job, and although I enjoy it mightily some listeners may want something with a bit more substance, more out of control. Admittedly there is something slightly sterile here, prompting a familiar contemporary scenario about young men alone in their bedrooms with their machines. This is perhaps the downside to romanticising the isolation-myth of Kasper Hauser; maybe these guys should go back in the cellar for another ten years. L@N are a duo from Dusseldorf, Rupert Ruwa Huber and Otto Muller, and this is their debut.
ED PINSENT
[2004 additions: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser may not have a musical soundtrack by Popol Vuh, but Florian Fricke has a cameo role in which he plays the piano. The ‘tree frog’ reference also comes from this film; it’s Kaspar Hauser’s way of solving a logic problem.]