Mutants in Siberia (CIRCUM DISC microcidi043) is an unexpected pairing of Joke Lanz with the Czech improviser Petr Vbra, a trumpeter who has played with Kurt Liedwart for Mikroton, and more recently as part of the trio Banausoi.
As Sudden Infant, Joke Lanz has produced shocking and subversive sound art, as evidenced on the unforgettable set My Life’s A Gunshot which collected his work from the 1990s and early 2000s. This Swiss trouble-maker is supplying turntable and voice here, and at first I was concerned we’d be in for a repeat showing of Songs From The Trashcan, the rather “wacky” LP he made with Beat Keller in 2023, but there’s a bit more grit going on under the hood and the gears are laced with kerosene…these motor metaphors evidently implying that I seem to be hoping for a car-crash or similar conflagration. It seems Joke and Petr have been doing this as a duo thing ever since they first met at the Hermitage museum some time ago (hence the name). It’s to their credit that they never set foot inside that mausoleum of dead culture and instead went to a cafe to drink wine.
It’s a bit of a stretch for the label press to identify this as a “power duo”, but there are some spiky moments of live electronics diving into the general malarkey of surprising turntable-exploits and skittery free improv from the trumpet. On a good day, a listener might want to see this release in a lineage that includes Stock, Hausen and Walkman – I mean semi-serious pranksters happy to take the mickey out of any musical forms or genres in the ether, but Joke Lanz is not so focussed on his targets. There may be one or two moments here that allude to chaotic and troubling current events, but he’s mostly happy to play the latterday absurdist or Dadaist, mocking everything in sight and seeing no real meaning in anything. Decent enough record, but I was hoping for a tad more excitement, more shock. Even the cover collages, while fun, are tame. (03/03/3036)