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Von Südenfed, "Tromatic Reflexxions"
Von Südenfed is the unlikely pairing of The Fall's irrepressible Mark E. Smith with Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner of Germany's Mouse on Mars. What results is not quite a post-techno version of The Fall, and not quite the post-punk reimagining of IDM. Instead, it's a dozen tracks of mutant digital funk fighting for attention as Smith drones, mutters, mumbles and hiccups his way through the machines, short-circuiting everything in his path.
There is a sense in which Tromatic Reflexxions might be the perfect realization of cyberpunk aesthetics: high-tech and low life. Mark E. Smith's rowdy, curmudgeonly vocals play the part of the drunken Mancunian football hooligan who has unwittingly wandered into a switched-on Dusseldorf club pulsating with mutant dance-funk extrapolated into its future manifestations by a sophisticated super-processor, and begins angrily ranting at the top of his lungs. Mark E. Smith has been quite vocal about his lyrics being influenced by writers such as Philip K. Dick, and the music of Von Südenfed goes some way towards realizing a musical soundworld that addresses these lyrical concerns. Not that you would know that judging from the press the project has received so far.
A recent feature in The Wire seems to indicate that this album was formulated partially as a response to LCD Soundsystem, who MES claims ripped him off, James Murphy stealing his vocal style for "Losing My Edge," and using the same rhythms as MoM. There's a problem with the claim that Murphy and Co. ripped off Smith and Co.: the LCD Soundsystem single came out in 2002, long before Smith's first collaboration with MoM on 2004's "Wipe That Sound" 12". Even discounting this time discrepancy, I think Smith sells himself and Von Südenfed short by claiming that Murphy in any way copped their style. LCD Soundsystem is all sass and low-fidelity throb: party-fodder for Williamsburg hipsters, single-minded and unsophisticated. Von Südenfed is avant-garde future funk for a generation that hasn't yet been born; a chaotic, eclectic and scattershot trawl through the many nuances of a tense and problematic musical assemblage. It is many things, but crowd-pleasing disco-punk it ain't.
As I suggested earlier, Von Südenfed opt not to recreate the noisy motorik of The Fall's classic sound, eschewing primitive post-punk clatter for plasticated synth peals and patently artificial beat constructions completely abstracted from whatever organic source they might have originally had. On tracks like "Fledermaus Can't Get Enough," the influence of The Fall's kraut-rock-abilly chug-n'-swagger is clearly present, but the track is tweaked and edited to within an inch of its life. The Fall have experimented with electronic music in the past, notably on 2000's The Unutterable, but have never embraced the hedonism of techno to quite this extent. MoM themselves have changed quite a bit since their early days of making wacky, chirping micro-dub. Radical Connector featured live drumming and vocals, including a wildly successful party anthem in "Wipe That Sound." Three more years down the line, their more radio-friendly instincts have merged once again with their propensity for odd and jarring bleepscapes; the addition of Smith on vocals adds a dynamic, unpredictable element that tips the scales into something completely new and unstable
A number of different approaches are tried across this album. "The Rhinohead" has the form of a straight-ahead rock song, but the devil is in the details: layers upon layers of digital fuckery, twitters and arpeggiations contribute a thick atmosphere that fights with the song's poppier instincts. "Flooded" and "That Sound Wiped" come the closest to DFA territory, MES delivering a sly, sardonic monologue against a loud, overamped future-disco track. MoM take every opportunity to tweak, mutate, double and vocoderize Smith's vocals, making it seem like they have the ultimate control over the shape of the track. This changes on tracks like "Serious Brainskin" and "Duckrog," where Smith's unhinged vocal delivery seems to pull apart the track at its seams, introducing an unstable element that threatens to upend the track, to which MoM can only respond hysterically with banks of glitched-out synths.
Even though Tromatic Reflexxions is chaotic by necessity and eclectic by design, all the tracks still sound like they belong together, and the group marks out their own unique sound that is quite different both from The Fall and Mouse On Mars. Von Sudenfed are not exactly playing to any current trends in underground music, but rather blissfully exploring their own mutual idiosyncrasies, engaging in a peculiar conversation across generational and stylistic differences. That this conversation turns out to make for such an interesting and often exhilirating listening experience is almost beside the point, as I'm sure they'd still be doing it even if no one was listening.
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