Every now and then you like a film so much you take it with you pretty much
everywhere- in one such development, whenever I listen to German electronic
music of the Kraftwerk variety, I have a, well, let’s call it acid flashback of
The Dude in the Coen brother’s Big
Lebowski distrustfully staring at a record cover for the imaginary album Nagelbett. The look on his face gives us
a hint he’s doubtful about the piece, to say the least, and the name of the
album itself is thought up to suggest something carefully crafted but
ultimately pretty damn uncomfortable.
The imaginary band is of course called Autobahn, an open reference to
Kraftwerk, whose perhaps most popular track bears that name and is taken from
the album Man Machine-it all
relentlessly leads to the point that these are beautiful artifacts to be
admired for the technical skill with which they are crafted, but ultimately,
of course, machine music has no soul.
Moderat come in the picture pretty nicely then: they are a ’super trio’ of European
electronic music, hailing from Berlin, Germany, crafted from the members of
Apparat (German for appliance, right) and Modeselektor and going as far as to
have a song titled Rusty Nails- a bed
of rusty nails, well that’s the epitome of uncomfortable, right there.
So the really amazing thing about them is that, in the middle of the pixel
and cable wilderness, their music makes you feel something. I might go as far
as saying that that is actually the border between crap electro and good
electro- the degree to which it elicits a response in the listener, going
beyond jumping up and down and flailing your arms to a beat.
The show is visually impressive too- I really can’t fathom why you would
squish yourself in the front row with the sweatiest vandals of the crowd instead
of taking in the whole stage from the back, but that’s material for another
post. It isn’t however, a gimmick, it’s not there to compensate for the fact
that the music itself is empty- it’s there to compliment it and make sense of
it. Machine music this may be- but it has both brains and a heart.
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