KOBAYASHI – dasselbe in grün

(Pic. 7”, Boris Karloff Noise)

A blast from the past. My personal past, that is. Kobayashi were one of the bunch of great, superfast, highly political and trashy to destruction Hardcore-bands from Vienna or around that belonged to the local hardcore scene in the days when I had my formative years in said scene. Amongst the other bands were Konstrukt, Programm C (which Kobayashi once had a split 7” with) and Prohaska. Mostly seven inch singles on (unfortunately shortlived) labels like Hammerwerk, Invertebrata or the legendary Sacro Egoismo. Of those, only Capeet records is still around, I think, though reduced to a mailorder? I can’t really say, because I have dropped out of hardcore quite a few years ago.

Phew, what else do I remember of that time? Long, cold nights in a wet squat, that was nevertheless important for being there at all, culminating in hot and explosive live shows and after that a long walk home through the night with ringing ears and freezing body. (Maybe one of the reasons I “dropped out”.) A bunch of fanzines and a bunch of promoters and a big bunch of all around nice people that had something in common. Shit, I am getting all nostalgic here?

And now this nice picture disc seven inch from out of nowhere, from the orcus that Kobayashi and all the other bands, projects, ideas and energy have faded into. Seven years after the songs have been recorded, four years after the songs had been mixed down. Was it really the production of the cover that took so long? (The cover plays with the wonders of colour addition physics and coloured foil. Nice work!) You wonder the international DIY-scene and the anarchist hardcore network never started the revolution? If it takes so long to release a seven inch single, how long would it take to set up an international revolution? Anyway, is that really important? The fact that a lof of kids went through the hardcore scene has definitely left a mark on them that will shine through no matter what they are doing now, almost ten years later, as family fathers or mothers, working in sales or marketing, after graduating from university or setting up their own business.

The seven inch is called “dasselbe in grün” (the same in green, transl.) and contains the five songs from the 1999 demo called “in wirklichkeit sind wir doch alle old school” (in reality all of us are old school, transl.) which makes me smile at the stupid discussions of back then about what is and what is not old or new (or middle… he he, thanks Jimmy Pop) school. It also contains two hitherto unreleased songs. I didn’t know the demo and with the seven inch on Invertebrata and the split with Programm C on Capeet, I guess I now have a hold on the whole discography. It doesn’t make sense to press a CD for that, though, because it would be over too soon.

As expected all the songs are fast trashers, some of them with some riffage for fingerpointing before the mosh takes up again. The guitar sounds is a little washy, the vocals are nothing but screams and the recording sound is pure noise. Probably because it is mainly demo material. The two "new" songs are crisper but still distorted verging on noise. I do remember it being that way and yes, it is quite close on their other releases as well. So it is probably on purpose.

That is said from the viewpoint of somebody who has been listening to electronic experimentalism for too long. Because there is still a lot of screaming, punching and kicking in these recordings. There is a residue of the energy that used to draw me to the hardcore shows back then in the late Nineties. Kobayashi had a funny side to them, that was well hidden inside personal polticis and an evil sense of irony. The song “Die Sau” (the pig, transl. But with a moral slant, meaning somebody who is morally despisable) contains only one sentence that is transformed from a series of jokes: “all kids are being shot, but not werner, he sells the guns.” Haha, laughter is dying in my throat. The other lyrics are longer, more encrypted and enigmatic but nevertheless just as direct to the target.