What a pleasure this LP is, a refreshing skew of anarchic jazz / freestyle surgery and falling downstairs momentums. There’s a manic urgency that makes AIDS Delikat one of my favourites of the Tapetopia series so far.
Recorded at the end of 1984, Christmas market sounds intersperse the action. The ping(ed) recoil of air-gun darts mingling with festive barrel organs, weaving between the goods, the fruit machine bling disrupted by lost child announcements over the tannoy, a weirding taste of normality jutting against what Klick und Aus had to offer. The band itself (like so many of these GDR sparks) had a short-lived existence, born on Walpurgis Night in 1983 and disbanded two years later when half the group left for better climes, and this collection gives a tantalising glimpse.
The first side embraces this punky straightforwardness, but it’s just a starting point, a template to scribble out of, distort — and it’s not long before it’s puzzle punching its space with Apache war-dances and lunatic screams, bleeding out with a chaotic passion all of its own. Defiant flavours and a tittering imbalance that the B-side abstracts further. Yeah, the engine is really over-revving by the flip, the shoaling fractures of “Das Schicksal Der Lymphozyten”’s tangent-spun ruptures avalanched in “Pjotr Schwert”’s frantic vocal abstracts. The screamadelics that explode your head on “Oppositionelle Infektion” are offset by the stomping rally cry of “Einzelkaempfer”, a catchy singalong riding a bass and drum march with blasts of fanfared trumpet (played by bassists Klick’s wife Evolinum) that give me the Dog Faced Hermans shivers. Then the Blurt-like bristle and splutter of “Karposisarkom” and the slowly cooked intent of “Systeme Rasten Ein” skewering a host of extra interest.They must have been an excellent band to take in from a live perspective, peeking at the liner pics — lots of spittle and twist, and I bet Sala Seil’s performance art fitted like a glove to all this errant action. The strange shadows that would have stretched to the terrifying child-catcher rasp and scuffling off-coloured jazz of “Spermium Letalis”. The manic convulsions caused by the odd two-tone rubble of “Lechzverkehr In Der Die Sperrzone” as it frayed delightfully out of shape.
It’s such a pity the band disappeared so quickly, but their flash-in-the-pan dynamics certainly dazzled. Another slice of DDR magic from Playloud’s archives.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
- Tapetopia 001, 002 and 003 are available from Play Loud!
