TUMIDO & STEFAN ROIS – s/t

(CD - zach)

You might know Tumido for the review we had on their collaborative night with Bulbul and KK Null all on one stage together. Or you might know them from playing great, tight, energetic live shows of musically distinguished and hard punching noise-rock. As I have heard their brand of drums and bass or guitar instrumental noise has gathered quite some attention in the affine circles. On this CD, the first recorded music I have heard of them, they team up with poet Stefan Rois for a more than interesting tour de force through various sentiments and styles circling around the axis of noise rock on the musical side and the condition of human existence in the modern world. If you amble along with me, I’ll give you a short itinerary of what is about to come onto you. Believe you me, you won’t regret it. Of course it won’t be a detailled description of song by song, because that is way too boring for me to write or for you to read, but rather a rough outline of what is happening.

The self-titled album starts off quite awkward with some breaks constructed to fit the syllables, but maybe this track is positioned as a barrier right at the beginning to fend of easy listeners and check-outers and keep those that listen closely. But right there in “Blind vor mut” (“blind with braveness” – all lyrics and titles are in German, I will give you translations here as good as I can) they lay down the whole plan of what they are about: “It is always and always highest time / to talk about around against it / to design sounds baptized for renewal / sounds that move what’s frozen / that depart into the unknown blind with braveness / because fear of liberty has been current for too long / today we don’t know what keeps us but we feel it / and that is why we put our own craziness against the world’s craziness / we despise the closed circle / our form is the open nothing / we creatures of greatness ... because your world is ours also.” So there it is, the whole plan of fighting against rigid structures and the vision of building something new, speaking up against the old and strict and speaking for the new and flexible, but also a sense of pragmatism and reality. A challenging target, indeed, but they hit the spot more often than no during the upcoming dozen of tracks. They are harsh to the listener, challenging him with an approach of direct speach and hard punching rhythms, but they are also harsh onto themselves, because in the face of possibly landing way short of their high hopes and plans they stand up on their hinds, kick it as hard as possible and grow out and beyond themselves in tightness, punch and complexity.

After the first two songs the music gets a little easier on the listener, or maybe it is a matter of getting used to it. On “Dort” (“There”) we get the first rised fist punching and shout-along refrain, and there aren’t a lot to follow as well. The next track onwards, “auge der welt” (“the eye of the world”) features a noisy, percussion rhythm somewhere between industrial and tribalism and more existential(ist) slogans and insights – this time taken from the old man of extreme philosopy Friedrich Nietzsche himself. Who is a fitting companion to Rois’ lyrics, also in the gentle megalomania of “this is not about posing / I only want to change the world”. Other lyrics as well could have come quite directly from the ink of Nietzsche, but also transported into the 21st century. A lot of people wonder what Nietzsche would sound like if he would have been born a hundred years later or even 1990, so he would be 26 now and working up the basic roots for “Zarathustra” to be ready in a few decades. Rois as well goes deep and beyond in questioning the basic existence of men (“what are we? Animal? Angel? Bio-machine? A bunch of molecules...”) The words are interesting and fitting to the music, spreading the anger and frustration about our modern civilization where ringtones and the soccer cup are more important than social equality or hunger in the third world. One text is a little trite because it is an excuse and doesn’t keep up in quality with the others, but I won’t mention what it is, you’ll know. The rest of them are topnotch.

One track is only lyrics, one is instrumental and one only has wordless screaming and shreiking like a bunch of chimpanzees. I am sure there is some structural idea behind that, that goes beyond showing the scope of what this configuration of artists is able to achieve.

One the left and right of Rois there are Bernhard Breuer, one of the tightest and original drummers in Austria next to DD Kern, and Gigi Gratt, who churns out new sounds and patterns from his bass with great focus on simplifying without losing complexity. After all there is a lot of variety on the album. From the almost hip-hop-esque “~”, where the one verse gets repeated over and over again and reminded people who listened to it to solo work of Thomas D, one quarter of the Fantastischen Vier, a german hip hop band and a good example to show what’s good with this album and bad about German hip hop. Because this Thomas D has been hailed for being the intellectual rapper, just for using a few hard words in his songs and sentences that don’t make sense right away; when actually he is just one step away from pure kitsch or trite MOR-radio-shit. Well, it is MOR-radio-shit, to be hones, because it gets played on MOR-shit-radio. Tumido and Stefan Rois on the other hand have some real and deep insight in their music and lyrics, punch harder and only record what they could play live.