Both Kinds Of Music

In 1991 the Dutch band Dull Schicksal (”Schicksal” is German for “fate”) released an album called “They Saved Hitler’s Brain”, a musical mixture between Hanns Eisler, brass ensemble punk, prog-rock, and waltz, featuring a song called “Hot Sausage Diary”. OK, you already know that you want the mp3s, right? Well, if you are impatient, jump to the end of this post and grab them all.

The Rotterdam-based band existed from 1984 to 1999 with permanent members Lukas Simonis (guitar, synth, vocals), Hajo Doorn (drums, keyboards, vocals, also known as Raoul Goudvis), Colin McClure (accordeon, bass, sousaphone, keyboards, vocals, sometimes listed as Colin McClean), and Henk Bakker (flute, clarinet, vocals). They had many guest musicians on their albums, most of them playing all kinds of brass instruments.

Dull Schicksal was part of the always evolving and notoriously underrated genre of Dutch-Scottish Squatter Avant-Garde Punk, like The Ex, Morzelpronk, De Kift, Dog Faced Hermans, Andy Moor, Yannis Kyriakides, Cor Fuhler and many more. To my knowledge the Netherlands are the only country in which the fusion of punk and avant-garde produced such outstanding results. Unfortunately, many of the older recordings are out of print and very hard to get, and the Dull Schicksal CDs are no exception, though a few of their releases are still available through ReR.

Before we get to the mp3 files, let me say a few words about the current projects of the ex-members of Dull Schicksal. It turns out that they are still active in some of the most exciting arts projects around. You should definitely check out all the links, you won’t be disappointed.

The surrealist multimedia performance group Coolhaven has a supremely weird website. (It takes some skills to get to the “main” site, where you will be rewarded with mp3s and videos. A lot of it in Dutch, though.) Right now Coolhaven is working on a project called “Strömblock Phantasieën” with German lyrics by David Hasselhoff. The band Liana Flu Winks plays easy-listening post-rock, Static Tics does electro trash, Apricot My Lady is an ambient noise improvisation quartet, Schreck an ensemble which plays electro-acoustic compositions.

Then there is the amazing venue and network WORM in Rotterdam, and tons of experimental audio and video on WORM.station. (Please only click on that link if you have at least a couple of hours to spare. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…)

OK, let’s get to the music. I really don’t have much information on this CD, except that it was released in 1991 on the ADM record label. The music is awesome, please listen for yourself.

Dull Schicksal - They Saved Hitler’s Brain
Dreigroscheneissler | Cruelty Asks For Delivery | Dogstabber | Defenition Of Reductions | God Took Away My Yesterdays, Part 1 | Pleading Not Guilty | Bad Reunion Day | God Took Away Part Three | Experimental Jolly Joe | Hebban Olla Vogalas

By the way, I have the feeling that the misspelling of “definition” has some deep meaning. And obviously God did not only take away the yesterdays, he also stole the second part of that suite and half of the title of part three.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 11:56 pm and is filed under mp3, Avantgarde. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.