Chris Imler’s 7″ is a real hit!
(Felix Kubin)

Chris Imler returns here on a 7″ with a straightforward appellation to his new one-man bang-gang: IMLER. This new waxing on the Meeuw Muzak label brings us a spirited pair of ear-jingling primeval drumtasms, the first a jerry-rigged version of the Chris Montez classic Let’s Dance and his own “sci-fi romanticist socialist anthem” Vorwärts on the flipside. There’s a lot of kinetic energy here, everything being recorded live with a rhythmatist’s ear for a chugging beat and waves of delayed gratification. Classic trembling Teutonic disco-punk, to my tea-curled ears at least. There’s a similar-but-different dark narcotic tease to Vorwarts, which kind of shimmies in front of your nodding head like a cold war stripper. Again, maybe that’s just me. Something to do with smashing atoms anyway. Two thick slabs of propulsive, edgy sleaze. Use it to lose it.

Dodgy drummer Chris Imler, infamously involved in Spankings and Golden Showers (these are groups) has also previously been associated with work with Puppet Mastaz, Peaches, Namosh, Electronicat as well as being one half of the Driver&Driver duo with Patric Catani, with whom he has toured the world and recently released a double album entitled We Are The World, funnily enough. This year he has also played drums for Soffy O, Die Türen and for Stereo Total in a theatre play. This is not to mention a detour into fine arts with a sound installation with Patric Catani for the Robert Wilson Institute in New York, as well as numerous remixes. (Pete Um)

Meeuw Muzak 039
Max Goldt / Felix Kubin / Mark Boombastik: Fog Frog
b/w Max Goldt: Ladies Ladies
7″ single

“The future is female”, announces the well-known homosexual ironist Max Goldt here (on Ladies Ladies) speaking in 1983, long before getting married to a woman and thereby exhibiting a confounding yet admirable internal consistency. This finely-tuned sense of amibiguity will be familiar to those who have followed Goldt’s work as a musician and then an author since the late 70s. He is of course also a noted columnist in the German-speaking world. Here on this record his lyrics and vocals are filleted from the historical timeline for a reconstitution involving the various talents of Mr Kubin and Mr. Boombastik.

Mark Boombastik: musician, singer, DJ and human beatboxer par excellence – giving the frogs something to hop to here on Fog Frog.

Felix Kubin: Ubiquitous celebrity in an alternative universe, but in ours a nebulous presence in the musical underground since the heyday of the Neue Deutsche Welle. A self-professed dadaist, one shouldn’t try and linger too long on a definition for Felix.

He is, however, the wicked svengali whose tendrils traverse time and space to tickle this record into existence, because Side B’s Ladies Ladies, as previously mentioned, is actually a post-feminist pre-ejaculation from way back when, here recently gently re-agitated in the Kubin studio. The 2003 “too-Neubauten” mix (involving electric heater percussion) of Fog Frog has been updated to a more judiciously organized final version, whilst still retaining the original tipsy-sounding recording of the famously discerning Mr Goldt in his hotel room. Aged like a fine wine, perhaps. Indeed the thin pining sounds come from a Fellini-inspired choir of wine-filled glasses. So, the old ladies meet the new frog princes and off they go. Here is the transformation. (Pete Um)