The Schwarzenbach: the amalgamation of Kammerflimmer Kollektief and German author, journalist and translator and Deithmar Dath, their name was selected in honour of the Swiss lesbian author and journalist Annemarie Schwarzebach. Marxist Dath, who’s previously worked with both the Kollektief and Mouse on Mars, brings another dimension to the already multi-faceted genre-defying angular experimentalism of the Kammerflimmer Kollektief. Consequently, ‘Nicht sterben. Aufpassen’ (which translates, I understand as ‘Do not die. Watch out’, or something similar) combines spoken word and avant-garde musicality to forge something that’s not readily digestible, but well worth chewing over.
‘Zarte Blute Hass’ is a squirming, sprawling 10-minute beast of an opening track – dark, sparse in arrangement but dominated by a heaving, grinding bass churn. It’s an intense, not to mention vaguely harrowing – way to start an album. Where to go from there? Certainly not into easy-listening mode: The minimalist electronica of ‘Gesich freihandig’ is rent by extraneous noise and shards of distant, wailing guitar feedback, and throughout the album’s nine tracks, woozy, languid rhythms and creeping, creeping atmospherics drift and scrape as mutant world music twists and crawls; there’s something of a Tom Waits-like seedy jazz strut swing to ‘Stark genug’ and the queasy post-punk reggae of ‘Las des bleiben’ ventures into the realm of the absurd with its Anglo-German crossover lyrics about rice. There’s no way you could accuse them of shying away from the strange – not so much facing it, as wearing its skin and parading it proudly like a killer’s trophy, ‘Nicht sterben. Aufpassen’ is dark, uncomfortable and disquieting.
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The Schwarzenbach Online
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