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Asmus Tietchens, "Geboren, Um Zu Dienen"
Although some might have called Tietchens’ United Dairies release, Formen Letzer Hausmusik, his first industrial release, this EG title, eighth in the reissue series, is truest to the form. Released in 1986, Geboren stuns in the same way early Esplendor tracks do, with blasts of chugging, caterwauling noise sounding straight from the factory floor. Tietchens’ most monotonously rhythmic work to date, it lacks the esoteric primitivism of earlier records or just severely limits the spaces in between, emphasizing speed in a defiant and less calculating way. Here is the artist realizing that his own devotion to excavated and mechanized sound, nourished by insular years of homespun synth modification and cyborg cocktail hour, is, for many others, a politicized vision, a voice of dissent and celebration.
Still, Tietchens remains an outsider, his tracks veering immediately from the stoic, resonant clang and noise surge of early Esplendor to imagine instead a smoky, confused planet of machinery, grinding fast towards the end of something or wailing inertly through the pauses, with barely, regrettably human voices full of pain and frenzy. Tietchens has stated the album’s (title: “Born To Serve”) inspiration from Cold War tensions at the time, and it’s not hard to feel the anguish in many of these subterranean plunges: a locomotive of flushing machine sounds sped past the point of their breaking and left to drag, drain and drivel, cut through with vocal shrieks and frail drones that feel new to the Tietchens lexicon. Strange that his most human-damning record to date is, to this extent, his most human in terms of allowing fragile or frayed elements more prominence.
The apocalyptic feel of the record is somewhat tempered by a remainder of spacey, Biotop-era sounds that feel, in this context, even more alienating and abusive, like a dance over graves, reeking of excess almost pornographic, and similarly leaving me feeling played-with. No Tietchens before this has ridden the ecstatic fringe or really reveled in anything but its own science, and I can appreciate Geboren’s accomplishment even if it does not feel as singular as the artist’s previous work. The three bonus tracks included with the Die Stadt reissue and recorded during the same period actually feel more like throw-backs to the Sky Records days anyway, so we’re reminded that Tietchens is a man of many changes and humors and much that Die Stadt is still holding back.
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