In his legendary tome "Krautrocksampler", the great Julian Cope once attributed monumental importance to the residency of Karlheinz Stockhausen in West Germany during the 1950-60s. At the very least, the value of the synthesiser to a whole generation of German musicians in the decades that followed was shaped by Stockhausen's presence.
I remember Cope's book at the exact moment I see and hear MIT for the first time: three energised young things from Cologne who appear to be picking up the mantle laid down by Stockhausen and running a decathlon with it.
Topping the bill at Kill 'Em All - the slowly-becoming-legend Camden club night curated by The Filthy Dukes - MIT take the stage a few minutes before 1.30. There's barely room to stand (although the residue of sweat and cheap beer under my feet makes it easy to stand still, melding my demolished converse sneakers firmly, as usual, to the rubberised floor) and the mood of the crowd swings somewhere between wired and tired. As I pushed my way upstairs a few moments earlier, some kid was clutching a friend and dragging him ahead of me to see "this band who look like a gothicky-Busted".
MIT make an impressive noise: they're advocates of a strident form of electronica that owes as much to the obvious [Kraftwerk] as it does to the sublime [a touch of PiL here and there, even some Nine Inch Nails, some Fall]. Rip open the heart of their sound and out tumbles a rock 'n' roll soul trapped inside a synthesiser.
Frontman Edi - a facsimile of a wide-eyed suburban kid from a Miyazaki animation but with a severe Damo Suzuki fetish - is a gutsy, electric presence. If it weren't for MIT, he might perhaps be making homemade bombs out of Mickey Mouse alarm clocks and sending them to the Reichstag.
Edi yelps through the set, screaming himself hoarse at the crescendo of almost every song and drowning in persperitive haze. Behind him, pretty-boy drummer Felix bombasts the songs along with an urgent abundance of humanoid beats, while at the keyboard MIT number 3 [I checked and his name is Tamer] completes the roll call.
They look good on stage too. I dig the weird trigonometry that comes from a drums-keyboard-singer setup. It works well for them, with Edi as the crazy lynchpin, teetering on the apex of this freaky isocilic arrangement. At times, he looks like he might fall off the stage or strangle himself on the mic lead. In the crowd, there are slight surges backward when he gets too close the front, causing a ripple effect that passes through the room and knocks a drink all over the bar.
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Stand out song "Goodbook" welds a stuttering-Frank Black vocal with a stooges-through-a-moog rhythm. It's an adrenalised trip into the strengths of the band - jagged, precise and mathy at times, loose and tumbling at others. It's the north stat amongst a brief and stellar set which winds up all too quickly.
When it's over, I'm struck by just how well they pull it off: there's personality in the songs, a humanity reaching out from a genre that doesn't always speak with an surfeit of emotion. Above all, there's something of the utmost worthiness in what they're doing - which you simply don't see much these days. MIT's starting point is so far ahead of their contemporaries, I feel genuinely elated to have experienced them in such cosy surroundings.
Whether you want to call it post-punk, art-rock or whatever might be this year's latest label, it's of an artistic standard that massages all the good parts of the brain. It leaves me stumbling out onto a cold Sunday morning London road, all fired up with the potential of music, the glory of all creation, the genuis of rock 'n' roll and all that other jazz that goes through your brain at such a tender and emotional time. Maybe it was the lack of sleep too or that cheese sandwich I had earlier on...but I digress. This could be their year - I pray that it is. Whatever happens, Stockhausen would be proud of these wonderful boys, the "gothicky-Busted".
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