Brummbratzeln
Foto: Wikimedia/Harald Krichel
The Caspar Brötzmann Massaker explore “the acoustic phenomena away from conventional tonality,” it was said recently in the music magazine “Visions”. This is well formulated. You can imagine something underneath. You then know immediately: There is nothing to get here for people who want to weigh themselves in a four -quarter time. We were talking about the band’s new album – the first in over 25 years.
Caspar Brötzmann, son of the free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, founded his band in West Berlin in 1986, at a time when the punk rock has long been past, but West Berlin was still a place that was a promise to all friends of non-compliant: Here I am a marginal group member, I can be here. The desire to generate as gruff, non-compliant sound with the means of rock music seemed to have been present with the then 24-year-old, who, as a young teenager, who worshiped guitarists such as Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) and Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple, Rainbow). They drove around with the collapsing new buildings and Nick Cave in West Berlin’s subculture. Until the mid -1990s, a handful of albums were created, the title of which suggests a preference for the color black (“Black Axis”, “The evening of the black folklore”) and contain the music, “which does not create an identity offer” (“taz”). The group played live in the preliminary program of mentally relatives like Sonic Youth.
The band had dissolved at the end of the 90s, only a few times you came together for one or the other concert. But a few years ago, the rugged, cumbersome, booming noise rock by Caspar Brötzmann from the American Southern Lord label, which specializes in rugged, cumbersome, booming noise rock, has been rediscovered. Two of the old records appeared in a new edition.
One of the basic questions of Brötzmann seemed to be loud from the start: What can you do with an electrically reinforced guitar to elicit her brutal noise to which you can’t dance? Since then, the artist has been working more, sometimes less intensively on answering this question. The practical exercises then seem to lead to pieces of music.
The trio is currently playing its first concerts in many years. A new drummer is also, Saskia from Klitzing, which you have known primarily as a drummer of the false colors. Last Wednesday evening, the “massacre”, as the band names itself, guested itself in Berlin-Kreuzberg. In the audience you can already see numerous carriers of T-shirts, the imprints of which (Celtic Frost, Sleep, Brutal Assault, Ten Foot Pole) already indicate which variety of musical rounds are preferred by those present: from Black Metal via Stoner-Rock and Doom Metal to Hardcore. The trinity of hearing with pain: dark, loud, massive.
As on command, the concert begins with a repetitive thunder rumble: Brumm, Bratzel, Brumm, Bratzel. It works for two minutes. You have time. Brumm, Bratzel. Then Brötzmann steps onto the small stage with his electric guitar and continues. With his fingers he drums and knocks on the guitar head. Here the instrument is not reduced to its conventional guitar end, here and today it can be completely sound body and sometimes produce grumbling brats or concrete mixing machine or aircraft engine noises if (or to which it handles) is just after that. It quickly becomes clear: Brötzmann is still the old one.
As on command, the concert begins with a repetitive thunder rumble: Brumm, Bratzel, Brumm, Bratzel. It works for two minutes. You have time.
The rumble of thunder and humming bridges noticeably turns into other, more intensive noises. Brötzmann scrubs, scraps, rubs and scrubs around his electric guitar and creates a dug and buys. What does the guitar do? She just whimpers and grumbles, but it booms and screams at the same time. That works. You don’t believe it, but simultaneous roaring and screeching is possible, I heard it myself. The drums and the bass accompany the roar perfectly by repeatedly falling into blunt, archaic rhythm. The rum of the rhythm group perfectly complements the squeaking of the guitar. Of course, Brötzmann cannot or does not want to sing, which the music does not do. Instead, he screams, wheezes or declates set scraps into the microphone. You don’t understand a single word of it, but that is not necessary either. You can feel the mood. One suspects that they are bad things that are talking about. Once you understand the word “breakdown”, which means something like a collapse, accident, machine damage. You know: Yes, exactly, that’s how it is. Sometimes he rubs his fingers on the guitar brass with his knuckles, as if he wanted to clean an invisible stain there with all violence. This also makes unpleasant noises on which this evening is not exactly poor overall.
In the calmer moments, it all sounds like a disoriented Neil Young on Speed the Atonal Soundtrack to a Bulgarian Underground Science Fiction film from the late seventies, in lively passages like a swans concert in the eighties, that is, as if you hear a single-ending upfalling sound, that of the Siren tones of a broken alarm system are accompanied, which can no longer be switched off. In the later course of the evening, the acoustic events for a cacophony of constant grinding, hammering, grinding, sawing, which one is someday without resistance.
Admittedly, this impro-noise-experimental rock, which is mixed with construction site noise, which you can listen to his origin from the Permissive 1980s, may not be for everyone. But let’s be honest: Andreas Gabalier’s beer tent key music for half-Nazis is not for everyone.