“Black Dog In Her” – show reviews from punk to s/m…

“Black Dog In Her” – show reviews from punk to s/m

“Shame on the girl
She’s got a big black dog in her
And while tough kids sing about tough kids
She just skins the world” (Suede)

To start the day with a smile: Listen to Max Tundra’s Remix of Franz Ferdinand’s “Do you want to” as first thing in the morning. If you haven’t heard it yet: He mixes Van Halen’s “Jump” synthline into it. I love him for doing so. It’s on his myspace site.

I’m going to dj three times this weekend and I’m really excited about each of those nights.

#01 Tonight it’s all about electronic music: I’m djing with Stefan Wagner, from minimal to electrish, from schranzique to technoid. (@ LOFT nürnberg, 10-4 – a location I’ve never been to before. It was a jazz club for a long time but now AFAIK has a new owner.)

#02 Saturday: Radio Z Fest! This is one of the two annual benefit parties for our great independent radio station. The cool thing this time is that it is at different locations in the same street: Lorenzerstraße. A tiny soup restaurant, a bar, a huge artspace, etc. And at the K4. That’s where ELECTRONICAT will play and where Seppo and I will spin the best mixed-genre set EVER! People won’t even leave the dancefloor for getting drinks. 😉

#03 Monday. No, this is not a Halloween party but finally another edition of our rare but beautiful GO BANG! nights. This time we invited JASON FORREST aka DONNA SUMMER and two ZÜNDFUNK DJs: Ralf Summer and Selectah Red. Plus us, the SOPHISTICATED BOOM BOOM dj team. And Wally who does the deco promised me one skull made of mirror ball reflector thingies. (@ the big room at the k4)

Looking back to last week: SHOKEI, WIVES and WRITTEN FROM NEGATIVE were great. I put up some pictures at www.evemassacre.de

SHOKEI were not only a visual and acoustic pleasure but also an attack on the audience’s noses as they rubbed themselves with Franzbranntwein, some really strong smelling medical herbs+alcohol essence. Certain ignorant people said it still smelled better than the tangerine scented spray that I had rediscovered when cleaning up at home. Tsk.

WIVES surprisingly had a split response: Me and some others loved their show, other’s said it was like some bad school band practising. I liked their rawness and how they managed to work free noise parts into straight stripped-down fuck-y’all-punk-songs. Rough and brutal and fun.

After them it took me a couple of songs to get into WRITTEN FROM NEGATIVE cause they sounded a bit tame compared to the WIVES. They play really good hipswing postpunk, Q And Not U / !!! / Supersystem style but with a portion of what you could call ’emorock’ if ’emo’ wasn’t that stigmatised. My problem was that this night I longed for something more aggressive and challenging, something that drives any other thought out of my mind. Lightning Bolt would have been perfect.

On the next day we drove to a TURBOSTAAT show in Würzburg. It was so unbelievably punk that when the first band was still playing there already was a guy who puked on the stairs on other people at the entry. Yuck. TURBOSTAAT were great and intense. Nothing more, nothing less. They have this haunting melancholy washing all over their music, maybe comparable to Blumfeld shows back in the days of their first album. I was drunk again. Seppo drove. It was good to see Kerstin (congrats on finding a job! or is it jobs?). We played silly bandname games on our way back to Nürnberg. I love motorways at night. They make me feel out of time and isolated. In a good way.

Talking bout feeling isolated in a good way: When I drove to Austria three weeks ago I first was a bit excited about driving on my own but it turned out to be a really relaxing experience. The long drives spent listening to music and audio books always had been one of my favourite parts of touring. With my old band we often hardly talked for hours but just let thoughts flow and enjoyed calming down. On Friday in Steyr I played with two bands that both sadly didn’t meet my taste. N.O.M. from Russia put on a theatrical russian avantgarde show that reminded me of socialist realism art: heroic, somehow testosterone dripping, all about power!power!power! while I’m more of a pow!pow!pow! person. There was nothing in their show that I could connect to. There are some kinds of bands and music that actually seem to shout: “This is not for you! You are not part of this!” The other band that played in Steyr was Zimbabwe from Lithuania. An all girl group that played eastern europe rock with ska influences. Not my taste either but this doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun. The people at the venue were really nice and I really had a good time. It’s an amazing venue for such a small town. The other night I played at Ladyfest Vienna at the EKH. Again the people who put it up were really nice and I met some old acquaintances. That night there were some acts I really enjoyed, and the overall vibe of the crowd was great. It was a mixed crowd but you hardly ever have so many women and openly queer people enjoying themselves at regular shows.

One of the bands I liked were FIRST FATAL KISS. They come from Vienna. They have this 80s Underground feel, think of Malaria or Au Pairs. Okay, maybe a bit more stumbling but not any single moment in an insecure way. They manage to get across the fun they have with what they play. Weird and funny and charming. It’s a somehow stripped down sound with only vocals, drums, distorted bass, keyboard and sometimes violin.

The other act I found really impressive were JET MOON & SAL TOMCAT, a couple that originally comes from Australia but now locates themselves in London’s Queer Mutiny scene. They put on a performance between political activism and gender crossing SM games.
They appeared on stage dressed in gender-neutral black block outfit: black trousers, black hoodies, black masks. Jet Moon did all the talking, about being political activist, standing up for queer rights and her speech soon mixed with s/m action as she tore off Sal’s hoodie tied her hands behind her back and slapped her hard a couple of times. That had a certain shock value cause I don’t watch someone beating someone else everyday but the whole scene had what I like about S/M: it kind of shows that lust and trust don’t just rhyme by accident. You have to trust each other, you have to know how far you can go without causing real pain. It’s like an unspoken contract that creates a sphere of safety. It’s kind of strange that this kind of mutual care is sometimes harder to find in the realms of what most people see as ‘normal’ sex as opposed to kinky stuff like S/M. I only once had sex where we really tried to explore how far we could go with pain with it still resulting in pleasure. It was great. On the other hand I remember a couple of times (especially when I was pretty young and insecure and didn’t really dare to stop the other person) having sex and being hurt by guys without them even realising nor caring that they hurt me.
What I don’t like about S/M sex is the overdone goth styling that it often is associated with and the role playing. Although I enjoyed watching the domination/submission game Jet Moon & Sal Tomcat put on. They also turned to some crossdressing, Jet got all vamped up as drag queen, or rather: as faux queen. One of the final scenes of the show was Sal dressed as business man sucking off a dildo that Jet had strapped on wearing her pink underwear / superhigh heel / peroxide blonde whig faux queen styling. The whole show was a rather sexy play with the dissolution of fixed gender roles mixed with a critique of capitalism.
And now it’s awfully late and I better stop writing.

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