“Exterrrrminate!” – Dälek, The Locust

“Exterrrminate!”
The Daleks


Please pardon a little advertising for a show tomorrow night that I’d like to recommend: Dälek, icons of apocalyptic underground hiphop, a brilliant dark hiphop act from New York will play at the K4 and after the show the residents of the SUB:CITY party, Tobi and Selfintoxicated, will make you dance till the morning! I don’t listen to much hiphop but Dälek is one of the few acts I’ve liked for a very long time. Many years ago Kerstin and Tobi of Eartrumpet put up a legendary show with them and The Lapse at the old Kunstverein which was breathtakingly noisy and gloomy. All lights were switched off while Dälek played, only strobe light giving you glimpses of the band. I remember that after their show it felt like I had witnessed something outstanding. A few years later I saw another great Dälek show at the Desi in which I was especially impressed when their dj guy at one point swayed his turntable through the air towards the speakers to play with the feedback just like Hendrix did with his guitar, I don’t think any other hiphop dj ever did that. It’s hard to compare Dälek with other acts. Back when I first saw them they were the Neurosis of hiphop for me, later I found The Bug in his Techno Animal days being a similarly brute but aesthetic beast. By now I haven’t seen the Dälek live for quite a while but listening to their ‘Abandoned Language’ album I am convinced that they have even grown, and they sure are a LIVE act. It’s hard to capture their presence on cd or vinyl.

Or as popmatters.com describes Dälek:
“If there’s one hip-hop act that’s absolutely, perfectly suited for Mike Patton’s great indie label Ipecac, it’s Dälek. Upon first listen to any Dälek album, there’s nothing subtle about the music whatsoever. The lyrics, recited in a clear, direct manner by the group’s namesake, are pointed and unflinching, part street poet, part visionary, part psychotic homeless sidewalk pontificator. The man is going to make himself heard, damnit, and nobody had better try and stop him, or there’ll be hell to pay. The music is equally hard-edged, but when it first kicks in, it couldn’t sound more harsh; boasting a sound that’s both bottom heavy and eardrum piercing, producers Still and Oktopus assemble a cacophonous pastiche that’s equal parts Throbbing Gristle, New Kingdom, and My Bloody Valentine, crating some of the scariest hip hop music to come out since Tricky’s masterful one-two punch of Maxinquaye and Pre-Millenium Tension. What starts off as sounding jarring and atonal, however, somehow seeps into your bloodstream, and takes on a strangely warm quality, the lugubrious, hypnotic beats resembling a sedate, steady heartbeat, the turntabling and basslines forming a warm, numbing wave of sound, and all the while, Dälek’s lyrics overwhelm you with their passion and poeticism. That’s the genius of this New Jersey trio, the music is so deceiving; it’s far from noise.”

Tomorrow. 29th of August 2008. K4. 22:00.
www.myspace.com/dalek

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There are good news for those of you who miss the Sophisticated Boom Boom parties: Tobi, Peter and I have ganged up with Quirin to start something new: KILL THE POOR!

6th of September will be the first Kill The Poor party night. We have decided to make it a limited edition thing that will only take place 11 times. We plan on having mottos and masks, or even costumes, and other silly interactive stuff that makes it hard to stay passive-cool-scenester-bystanders. Most important: we want YOU to dance your asses off! I’ve made a myspace site for it that you can add right here:

WWW.MYSPACE.COM/KILLTHEPOORPARTY

There will be a possibility to get in for free that you will be able to get through that myspace site or if you email us at:
ancientofmu@googlemail.com

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Sometimes I wish I would manage to get up early more often. Feel free to hate on me, you regular workers, but usually I don’t manage to get up before 9 or 10. Which is a shame because if you have time to take things slow the hours between 6 and let’s say 9 are really special. This early in the morning everything seems ‘clean’, the head still swept empty from sleep, everything still seems promising and only slowly the sounds and impressions of the day set in. Today I managed to get up at 7 and read the paper for almost two hours. Slow-mo day. Felt good. Then I put a messie-load of clothes into the washing machine, carried a bazillion empty bottles downstairs to take them away later. That made me instantly feel like having accomplished something and thus I felt free to take some time for blogging along.  Of course I got distracted by myspace browsing and messages… finding out Death Sentence: Panda will play at Kafe Kult, I will sooo be there! Checking and answering emails, finding out that Des Ark will now play in Würzburg at the 19th of October which is the date on which we can’t put up that show for them at the K4 because it’s one of half a dozen of ‘quiet holidays’. In germany (especially bavaria) church is still so powerful that there are a couple of christian cult holidays on which it is forbidden to dance and play loud music and put up shows in public. Makes me feel like being stuck in the Footloose movie. It’s so absurd and restricting if you think of it but in Nuremberg the police has controlled those days increasingly harsh over the last few years, and the fines are high. I wonder how long this has to go on until we get our asses up to start some real protest. I feel a bit lame for complaining but being so passive about it.

* _ *

Two days ago Quirin and me drove to a Locust show at the Feierwerk in Munich. We did a good job in acting it out as if it were a holiday trip because both of us can’t afford a real one. Once more I realised that I have too many friends that are equally careless as I am when we found out that both of us hadn’t looked up the route before we left, blindly relying on each other. This seriously happens too often considering the gas price these days. Thanks to mobile phones and friends and gas station staff we still found the venue. And as no trip to Munich is a good trip withouth a little socializing with at least parts of the Kafe Kult peer group I was relieved to see some familiar faces turning up with Steffi Ragarella and Christian and Gott & die Welt Stefan. I also met a friend from Gießen which was a nice suprise. We missed half of the Rumpeln show cause it wasn’t very loud so we didn’t hear that it had started when we were standing outside chatting and smoking. Please, venues, now that we have this annoying smoking ban, can you please put up some signal when a show starts? Thank you. The part of Rumpeln that we caught was all about noisy rhythmic structures and video stuff with a toaster and he seemed to control it with a wii stick, or rather: he seemed to try to shove things out of control with a wii stick and lots of analog electronic apparatusses. (Or is it apparatussi?) ‘t was interesting but I confess I didn’t get into it in the few minutes that I had a chance to listen. A bit too abstract. After that Made Out Of Babies played. The first two songs I felt like being time-kicked back to a cross of an early Soundgarden and Babes-In-Toyland show and somehow I first liked at least parts of it, I guess because I’ve got a weak spot for female screaming psych style singers but the longer I watched it just sounded and looked like exactly the kind of grunge/crossover stuff from the 90s that I really can’t stand. Too pathos-laden, too wanna-be-weird&tough… I don’t know. Not my kind of thing but I don’t complain: hanging out in front of the club was fine too. It was good to meet Jeroen and one after the other all of The Locust guys again. And their show was good. Except for one annoying guy standing about a meter or two away from me who kept shouting ‘fuck you’ and showing the band his middle finger but everyone did a good job in ignoring him. It was weird that I understood every word he shouted although it wasn’t exactly a quiet show. On the contrary: Synth, drums and vocals were really loud, and especially the synth working its way through a wide range of noisy frequencies during one of the ambient parts killed my ears. In a good way though. Sometimes it’s got to hurt to be good. I regret whenever the tinnitus sets in but I’d still say it’s worth it. Their set had a good ‘arc of suspense’ (in lack of a better word), shrieking sounds, sharp attacks just letting go to make the next hit seem even harder, ambient parts, intense rhythms (from a beautiful deep red ludwig drum set) that make you want to move along but also lots of unexpected breaks that make it impossible to tap along. Somehow that kind of music always gives me the feeling that it’s the incorporation of an intense longing for something absent that you can’t put in words nor music. Like something strong is happening between the lines but you can’t put your finger on it. It’s strangely satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. Does that sound esoteric? Damnit. I’ll better stop.
Anyways. It was a wonderful little excursion and mucho thanx to Quirin for driving. Somehow that evening set a new tone to my days, I feel mucho better and calmer again.