REVIEW
Es Liebt Dich und Deine Korperlichkeit ein Ausgeflippter
Workshop
Blue Chopsticks
2002
Folklore and the Future
By Scott Lockard
Kai Althoff, world renowned German visual artist and musician, has an acute sense of the young German psyche dealing with the macabre events of a tarnished history. He attempts to communicate, via folklorish and chilling imagery, that post WWII citizens must accept that they are inheritors of a turbid past and must initiate a dialogue about where to go from there. These sentiments are reflected in his musical project Workshop.
The Cologne, Germany-based team of Kai Althoff and Stephan Abry have made an extraordinary U.S. debut on Drag City's more experimental pop offshoot label Blue Chopsticks. Although the band has released a number of eclectic albums in Germany for over a decade, their first and long overdue American release, Es Liebt Dich und Deine Korperlichkeit ein Ausgeflippter (You and Your Physicalness are Loved by a Dropout), is creating ripples in the American independent pop music consciousness. The album waxes and wanes in complexity throughout the psychedelic saga and can be viewed as a soundtrack to a lucid and epic dream.
An initial listen may reveal similarities to the understated yet intricate rhythms of Can's Tago Mago and the more melodic and accessible tracks on Faust's IV such as "Giggy Smile." (Althoff did play drums on Can guitarist Michael Karoli's 1984 solo album Deluge.) Subsequent listens reveal the captivating power of Ausgeflippter. Workshop forges their own musical template and the allusions to the styles of their seminal Krautrock forefathers are soon forgotten and never to return.
On the first track, "Fur Wen?," the intro is wrought with building tension via harps, classical guitars, and simple repetitious taps on a bongo drum, creating a mesmerizing flow into the musical chapters that follow.
"Scheusalstage" kicks it up a notch with strings, driving classical guitar and an infantry-like snare pulse. While strings have been gratuitously used by nearly every indie-pop band that has abandoned the DIY ethic in favor of lush productions, Workshop exercises a great deal of restraint.
The all-German vocals skate on top of the underlying music like a three-day-old helium balloon struggling to maintain its buoyancy. Althoff's purely poetical lyrics - translated in English in the liner notes - lends powerful and surrealistic imagery consistently throughout the album. In "Die Verwundung" (The Wounding) he sings, "Recently the tall man with the cart silently shifts me along the whole way at the field, up to the parent's house. The wounding was so bad the leg was numb. One had to lie on the back." The vocals form an inseparable marriage with the instrumentals, a result of their play off of the music's rhythmic skeleton.
Minimalist use of instruments makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. In addition to the fanciful lyrical content, "Die Verwundung" features a simple driving rhythm of a drum machine, a cheap Casio interpretation of a Fender Rhodes, and tremolo guitar. The result is a hauntingly eerie composition resembling two music boxes playing the same tune slightly out of synch, with an anxiously thumping heartbeat driving them in their final moments before their momentum succumbs to the laws of perpetual motion.
Playful disco beats, ethereal analog keyboard pulses, sitars and harps bring us out of the aura of the foreboding on "Jetzt ist Verkanz" (Now there is Vacancy) and a new understanding is reached at the album's conclusion; we awake to updated and reinvented traditions.
Es Liebt Dich und Deine Korperlichkeit ein Ausgeflippter is enigmatic, strikingly beautiful and thought provoking. Perhaps a primary reason for Ausgeflippter's success is Workshop's conservative approach to instrumentation and production. Workshop doesn't callously requisition the artistic vices of their Krautrock ancestors or take on the stereotypical mechano-electric aesthetics - as their name might imply - of a Germany forging a brazen path to the future. Rather, they create an amalgam of these extremes by tempering them and fostering the contemplation of mythology and the present.
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