Schlammpeitziger – What’s Fruit?

Pingipung

“Are you chicken, bone or soup?” asks Jo Zimmermann at the start of the title track of his latest electronic oddity using the Schlammpeitziger identity. “Are you a castle, tone or group?” he wonders, offering “Are you sentence, word or dot… button, box or cock?” and sundry other suggestions before pleading in an almost comically louche tone, “What’s fruit?”

An idiosyncratic sense of humour has always been part of Schlammpeitziger’s music, which bubbles and bounces to the sound of liquid outer space disco grooves, hi-hats tittering, bleeps sniggering and cycling while the beat works out like an exercise freak hepped up on too many artificial goofballs until the point of no return to normality being possible. In this sense, the tone and charismatic wibble of the sound retains the bright, off-kilter sheen it’s had since Schlammpeitziger first squirmed into being in 1992. In common with Zimmermann’s friends and colleagues on the A-Musik and Sonig labels such as Mouse On Mars, Oh. or others of the Nineties Cologne school of peculiarly catchy sub-orbital space pop, his intricately-crafted electronica is often offset by an undertow of psychedelic derangement.

Playful and seemingly relentlessly cheerful, What’s Fruit? propels the listener into a synaesthetic realm where sound dissolves into primary colours tinged with a hint of acid-bleed unheimlich dementia, sparked by incipient distortion and an unsettling feeling that musical reality’s definitely on the blink again. Sometimes it sounds like Yello got an extra dose of genetically-modified recombinant MDMA in the Bollinger. At others, it’s as if the shiny, happy pills in a drug-calmed utopia have been spiked by a dissident chemist out to heighten the sense of unreality until the chemically-squashed populace wake up and smell the slave labour which really produces the coffee for the brave new world. Either that, or Schlammpeitziger is a somewhat twisted freak who likes his ludic day-glo disco with a hefty dose of weird; perhaps it’s a bit of both.

-Antron S Meister-