In 1981, Berlin, »this city of permanent decline,« must have looked like a particularly »pleasant spot on earth to live in«. Or at least that is how the young actor and moderator Wieland Speck put it as he hosted the programme of the »Grosse Untergangsshow« on September 4 of that year. This extremely cheerful apocalypse, which took place under the imprint of »Geniale Dilletanten,« was to become well-known and set new trends in style. With neat understatement, Speck, very much the gigoloesque »waver«, a word he later used to broadly characterise the appearance of the Neue Deutsche Welle, presented a dozen or so cacophonous live acts that had been founded shortly before or assembled especially for this event. The venue was the Tempodrom, which at the time was still an improvised tent next to the Wall at Potsdam Square. A short time later, a small Merve book with the – deliberately misspelled – title »Geniale Dilletanten« made the rounds and Berlin was so to speak rehabilitated on the »scene« map. Only the music and recordings from the festival itself remained under lock and key for a very long time.

This situation has now been remedied by a box set issued at the end of last year by the German Vinyl-on-Demand label. The festival is presented in three formats at once – vinyl, CD and DVD (plus an accompanying booklet) - although no two of these are exactly the same and each has individual bonus elements. The video version (produced by »Gesunder Film«) is naturally of particular interest, as, although the Berlin sound of the early 1980s was to have an international career owing to the Einstürzende Neubauten, visual renderings of it, especially in its early period, are not always to be easily found. And thus, this video document highlights how music at the time, however atonal it may have been, was primarily based on the insistent exploration of its sound components. Before any »visual turn,« but also before the era of quick access to whatever material of one’s predecessors one wanted, the modernist urge towards the media-immanent shifting of borders triumphs here once more, even if a lot of »extra-musical« sound-producers, like metal parts or microphone stands, have to do stand-in duty. And thus, a now-forgotten group called »Wir und das Menschliche e. V.« scores a success with massive bass orgies, whose slow, inexorable increase in intensity is one of the secret highlights.

If long, repetitive loops are at one aesthetic pole, their counterpoint is – almost always – a particular emphasis on the sudden, improvised, »unstudied«. Blixa Bargeld on an (untuned) guitar was probably the most impressive embodiment of this classic modern figure for a time, whether with the »Neubauten« (who here have already become a quartet) or in a duet with Gudrun Gut, which contributed abrupt one-liners on the topic of blood to the »Untergangsshow«. The then 15-year-old Alexander Hacke and the »star author« Christiane F. constituted a kind of parallel formation. Under the name »Sentimentale Jugend,« they sarcastically summed up not only fears of the atomic bomb (»Hiroshima, wie schön es war«), but also general fantasies of disappearance (»Ghetto«, »Weglaufen«). Here, too, the noise factor dominated any form of visual emphasis.

The most »visual« performance, if you like, was that of »Die Tödliche Doris«. This group, formed by Wolfgang Müller, the co-organiser of the festival and wordsmith (»Geniale Dilettanten«), had come up with its own stage and costume concept, where the musicians appeared as abstractly and expressively painted feathered creatures (the bass player Nicolaus Untermöhlen was the only one to display a little glamour with his glittery top). Although its introductory text, presented by the moderator, seems today like rather an unnecessary piece of misogyny, in live performance the group found the form of presentation that was most congenial to it, one that provided an excellent counterbalance to the monotony or musical denial that it so rigorously practised. Even 25 years after their creation, the bon mots that provide the titles, such as »Die Schuldstruktur,« »Stümmel mir die Sprache« and »Der Tod ist ein Skandal,« still exude an inalienable freshness that was always best kept to itself and that always changed into something completely different whenever someone tried to grasp hold of it.

That is at least according to the retrospective legend that Müller still upholds today about the activities of »Tödliche Doris«. The fact that this music did not necessarily require the medium of sound was proven among other things by the project »Gehörlose Musik«, which Müller presented in 1998 at the Berlin Volksbühne. Here, the music from the famous (now long out of print) record of the year 1982 was translated into sign language by two actresses. They gesticulated, danced and acted to Dilettanten classics such as the above-mentioned »Stümmel mir die Sprache,« »Panzerabwehrfaust« or »Über-Mutti« - in a virtuosic manner that did complete justice to the fragmented character of the pieces, as can be seen on the recently issued DVD version (with or without the accompanying music). That music does not necessarily rely on the medium of music also accords to an old modernist credo. A credo that the protagonists at the »Untergangsshow,« despite all the negativity they put on display, took to heart in an extremely positive fashion.

The box set »Die große Untergansshow – Festival Genialer Dilettanten« was issued at the end of 2005 by www.vinyl-on.demand.
The archive of Die Tödliche Doris can be found at www.die-toedliche-doris.de or www.wolfgangmueller.net/.
The DVD »Gehörlose Musik« by Die Tödliche Doris has been available since June 2006, issued by Edition Kröthenhayn (www.kroethenhayn.com)

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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