Christmas Around The World III
While I really enjoy being back in Berlin, the big city and everything, I am suffering under a lack of good internet access. The Germans don’t really believe in free wireless, and the only two places I found which have it are the Sony Center and Salomon Bagels (Joachimstaler Str.). However, the first place is a crappy and expensive tourist magnet, and the second one is smaller than your average walk-in closet. I’ll try to keep posting new stuff on a regular basis, but expect delays and not too much audio until January 7th. Oh, and while I am at complaining, the Berlin weather in winter sucks hard. I would choose Montana subzero temperatures with lots of snow and sun over this grey rainy/snowy/sludgy mess any day. And though we Germans like to complain, and I could go on for hours on end, I will refrain from doing so today and get going with the holiday music.
For reasons beyond my control, today’s Christmas offering again comes from the land of Kraftwerk and Señor Coconut. Last time I presented German Christmas music from the 80s, today we have German non-Christmas music from the 90s. Yes, it is the least Christmas-related of all Christmas albums I have ever come across, and that is one good reason to feature it. In 1995, Caspar Brötzmann and F.M. Einheit released an album of live improvised noise and called it Merry Christmas for no good reason. Caspar Brötzmann is the son of free jazz veteran Peter Brötzmann, and well-known for his heavy distorted guitar drone work with the band Massaker. F.M. Einheit aka Frank-Martin Strauss was the legendary drummer of Einstürzende Neubauten from 1981 to 1996, who redefined the notion of drumming in industrial avantgarde bands, using rocks, found stuff from construction sites, metal buckets and every conceivable noise-making object. He left the Neubauten when he thought they were not innovative anymore and continues making interesting music to the present day. He is well-known for his music for theater and radio plays, in particular several solo works and award-winning collaborations with author and journalist Andreas Ammer.
The album starts off with the Christmas carol Panzer Kette (Tank Chain), and reaches the heights of the holiday spirit with the title track Merry Christmas. That track starts with soft percussive noise and some foreboding low frequency guitar. In the middle, a quite annoying high frequency noise starts to kick in for a short time, and the music gets more aggravated and less cohesive towards the end. I swear to you, it is exactly how you feel at Christmas Eve, a priceless piece of sound art. Actually, the whole CD is like that, so I guess it is Christmas-related after all. In my interpretation the three unnamed tracks at the end of the CD symbolize the time-honored tradition of running amok in a drunken frenzy after having been exposed to the relatives and huge amounts of booze for too long. Here is one of them. Just don’t get caught, whatever you do…
By the way, you can still buy the CD, my friend.