At the start of the nineties, a handful of noise and ambient freaks launched the label Mego. Everything became an instrument, no one was interested in harmonies, and dramaturgic structure only meant increasing the intensity and testing the audience’s patience. The fewer listeners were left at the end, the better the gig. In the second third of the nineties, a hype went around the world: Vienna Electronic Music. And there were people who found it a matter of course when the picnic or the party – in hastily adapted spaces – was permeated by high and low frequencies, pumping basses and whirring noises, and the protagonists looked like boring physics students behind their G3 computers. Anyone who wanted to hear more placed the products by Mego, Laton, Charizma and co. on their shelves in prominent positions; this here is not about downtempo and lounge/coffeehouse music.
This hype has long been over. But the interest of some music fans in experimental access to laptops or analogue equipment seems unbroken. In 2003 Michaela Schwentner (DJ Jade, video artist) and Stefan Németh (Radian, Lokai) founded the label MOSZ, which aimed at exploring the border between analogue and digital musical concepts – with the goal of presenting the diversity of working approaches and musical strategies or experiments. The current catalogue of publications reads like a kind of general store that can meet a variety of tastes, or like a sort of general assembly of all those who want to have something to say in this musical field even in 2006.
The duo KAPITAL BAND starts off the proceedings; here, percussionist Martin Brandlmayr meets Nicholas Bussmann from Berlin, which works better as a live act than on a recording. Whether with the catchy album of the sound-tinkerer Peter Syely, with the surprise record of the 2004/2005 season, complete with political message, by the successful Gustav, or with the rock boy group Metalycée – MOSZ looks after the legs as well as the mind. Names like Martin Siewert, Boris Hauf, Florian Kmet and Peter Rehberg have been known for years on the basis of various solo works and collaborations, although the latter, known as the co-founder of Mego (now unfortunately a thing of the past) had not produced any work under his regular name before his MOSZ issue, »Fremdkoerper«, something which came in useful with regard to the idea of presenting debuts.
The design of the CDs adheres to a uniformly minimalist model, while the covers look different and give the artists space to visualise their music, as Eva Jantschitsch (Gustav) very charmingly does. If one looks closely, one discovers the SKE logo on every cover. The SKE distributes money raised through the former blank-tape levy (now applied to burnable CDs, MDs etc.) to labels or bands, which means productions receive financial support that would not otherwise exist. MOSZ is still busy, whether at the Sónar Festival in Barcelona or with the issue of an album by Pan.American, the solo company of Mark Nelson, who created so-called post-rock with Labradford and has just recorded a very calm, emotional album about the birth of his child, Album »For Waiting. For Chasing«. And that’s not meant to sound kitschy: »It means a great deal to me to share some of the chaos and grace of this time in our lives. Thank you for listening.«

http://www.mosz.org

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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