Current music from Germany  Popcast #03/2024

With music by:

KHAVN & THE KONTRA-KINO ORCHESTRA | Rheinschallplatten
ARON & THE JERI JERI BAND | Urban Trout Records
Xmal Deutschland | Sacred Bones
Messer | Trocadero
Monta | Labelmate/Awal
Author: Ralf Summer
Speaker (English): David Creedon 
Speaker Female Voice-Overs (English): Louise Hollamby Kühr Anyone who founds a record company these days usually does so out of conviction. This is also the case with the label of brothers Thomas and Markus Rhein, the unsurprisingly named Rheinschallplatten. A new addition to this label dedicated to eclectic releases with a somewhat punky touch is a soundtrack to a film about the work of the Filipino poet, pianist and filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz, who delivers his own soundtrack with his Khavn and The Kontra-Kino Orchestra on The Woman Who Went Mad. The album is as multi-faceted as the career of the enfant terrible of Southeast Asian film, born in 1973, and explores the emotional depths of folk, jazz and everything in between on 18 beautiful, mostly instrumental tracks.
 
Mbalax is the name given to modern Senegalese dance music, a mixture of soul, jazz, Latin, rock and the traditional drum music sambal from Senegal. On Dama Bëgga Ñibi, Aron & The Jeri Jeri Band enrich this sound with Afrobeat and jazz. The debut album of the project, which the exiled New Zealander launched with Senegalese sambal musician Bakane Seck, was created in Aron Ottingnon's studio in Kreuzberg after the two met in Berlin and discovered the high degree of overlap between their respective musical roots and preferences.   With the post-punk and new wave of the late 1970s, a new, dark music genre emerged, mainly from Great Britain, which found imitators all over the world, especially in France and Spain, but also in Germany: Gothic. In 1981, five young women (later with a man on bass) from Hamburg released a raw, dark, noisy single, Schwarze Welt, on the now legendary local punk label ZickZack.
 
Xmal Deutschland, as they called their band, secured a contract with the London 4AD imprint after their first steps in Hamburg, were invited by John Peel to one of his sessions and are still a trademark of German - and German-language - gothic music today. The early recordings have long been unavailable or only available at collector's prices, but now (on March 8th) Brooklyn's Sacred Bones is releasing the Early Singles 1981-1982 with 8 tracks, as the name suggests, from the early days of one of the most influential bands in German music history. Messer was founded in this millennium and their music is an intelligently compiled mixture of four decades of post-punk history, furious no wave, jagged funk and sharp German-language lyrics that repeatedly veer into the lyrical.
 
The quartet from Münster, led by writer and visual artist Hendrik Otremba, are full of energy on their new album Kratermusik ("Crater music" – the word 'crater', according to Otremba, is related to the word 'knife', Messer, the name of the band, in "some way"), combative but always abstract - Messer remain undecided, questioning and searching, especially when it comes to existential questions of today, war and peace or the future of the planet. But one thing is certain - the world would be a worse place without Messer.   Musician and songwriter Tobias Kuhn is on a completely different musical planet with his solo project Monta on his first new album since 2003. Sometimes it can just be pop, music in which the intimate and the hymnal come together. Inspired by old film recordings from his childhood, Pacific is a melancholy, introspective chamber pop album with an overwhelming intensity and great attention to detail in the arrangements. The songs were created over a period of several years between Vienna and Sicily, with stops in Berlin, London and Los Angeles; a working method that has led to a collection of great moments that could hardly have been achieved in the studio alone. If spring were to find a musical expression, it would probably sound something like Monta.