Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet, "Happy As Pitch" cd (Crippled Intellect Productions, 2006)

Before getting into this review, my hugest thanks must go out to MP Lockwood, without whom this review would have been lost to the deepest, blackest depths of this porno-viewing utility we call the Internet. Moral of the story is: always keep a back-up copy! And now, onto the review!

Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet, "Happy As Pitch" cd
(2006, Crippled Intellect Productions)

Without making too many broad generalizations and statements about my feelings towards the state of "noise" in 2007, I am willing to say this: more often than not, I like my noise peppered with a healthy dose of FUN. Now, I can get down with some shit-stained Michigan scum-crust. I'm a paying customer of Chocolate Monk, Hanson, and all the other fantastic dirtbag labels (and I mean that as the highest of compliments), and I'll eat up everything from To Live and Shave in L.A. to Fat Worm of Error to The Gerogerigegege to Gastric Female Reflex, but I cut my baby teeth on early Boredoms. Hearing Boredoms for the first time was akin to a spiritual awakening. They were at once the single most horrifying and incredible band I'd ever heard. Nearly everything I like about noise rock, noise music, art, performance, whatever, can be seen directly connected to my absolute appraisal of everything Boredoms-related. This is my bias. In the past year I've found that the noise that appeals to me the most, is the not the horror-obsessed paint-fume lurch rock, but the excited real gone ecstatic stuff that's most preoccupied with cooking up a juicy stew of some totally weird sound. Currently, at least on this continent, my money for the most alien sound-making goes directly to the Brutal Sound Fx community in San Francisco, California. A community of musicians and artists responsible for Caroliner Rainbow, Rubber 0 Cement, The Bran (...)Pos, Ecomorti, Tarantism, Commode Minstrels in Bullface, Spider Compass Good Crime Band, Diatric Puds & The Blobettes, anyone who's ever performed at a Godwaffle Noise Pancakes show, and of course, Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet.

Now here's the skinny: Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet have a great bio (which you can read here) full of a lot of made-up comical nonsense, they perform in costumes with cardboard German houses on their heads, and they make a freakishly atmospheric racket that only members of the Caroliner Rainbow Extended Ergot-Poisoned Singing-Bull of the 1800's Family Tree could. Imagine yourself in a pre-WWI German village where wooden children with mekanikal insides have taken over as they conspire to concoct the most demented Moog-driven kling-klang you've ever heard in your livenlife. "Okay...so they're like a Germanic Caroliner Rainbow, right?" Wrong. Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet take the sonic blueprints already conjured up on the more instrumental Caroliner albums ("Toodoos," for example), but make it their own special brand of brutal sound effects with a heavier emphasis on orchestration, vintage analog electronics (they'll make you moo "MOOOOOOOOG") and a subtler approach to the sensory overload aesthetic first pioneered by the Caroliner Rainbow costume crew.

Featuring three multi-part kompositions spread out over 13 tracks, Hans Grusel and co. krank out some delightfully strange electro-acoustic music on "Happy As Pitch." Where one song will be heavily based on original compositions for the Moog System 15 synthesizer, the next track will find the group goofing around with electronically manipulated trumpet and violin, or performing a bizarre song and dance number in waltz-time. Each individual piece of the album sounds different from the next, with tracks being drawn out just long enough to leave you wanting more, while never boring you with repetitious passages or ill-conceived improvisations.

More and more these days it seems to me that the greater majority of electronic musicians are wont to follow whatever trend flies within view of their gnat-like attention span (Digital Hardcore today, Harsh Noise tomorrow...), thankfully Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet avoid the typical trappings of genre entirely. Instead, these "Germans" have gone and carved out a kooky niche utterly unto themselves, while at the same time acknowledging the influence of the artistic community from which their semi-organic limbs came a sproutin'. Although it may be over a year old now, but "Happy As Pitch" is absolutely worth repeated visits. Their recent appearance at the 2006 No Fun Fest was one of the festival's highlights (so I've heard) , and I expect to be more material from them to be arriving very shortly (I see they've got a "Filmworks" box-set due on Resipiscent Records).

If you've never been exposed to Caroliner Rainbow, Rubber 0 Cement, or any of the San Francisco noise artists I've mentioned, I'd recommend that you immediately drop your pants and direct yourself to the Brutal Sound Effects and Resipiscent sites and familiarize yourself with the fantastic world of high-energy electronics, cardboard-clad performance artists, and outright awesome sound.

"Happy As Pitch" was released through Crippled Intellect Productions. I purchased my copy through Forced Exposure, and I highly recommend you do the same (and while you're at it, gribben-grab a copy of their ultra-limited, Ultra Eczema-released lp, "Another Miserable Day").