Cover (jpg, 300dpi)
Tilo: Our third cooperation – The first working title was “Hansey” – one of Doro’s friends was our inspiration this time, mainly as far as the lyrcis are considered. In the end we found ourselves skimming through old Orkus editions (Orkus = German goth magazine) and played lonely-hearts-ads puzzle. Musically we proved that you can produce dance tracks, like the ones of L’Ame Immortelle, which are both goth-compatible and “dark” by using loops like the ones you can find on a cheap Data Becker Sample Collection. All in all you can say it’s a track true to the motto “garbage in – garbage out” – unfortunately nobody but us will understand it ;-) Above all I couldn’t leave indulging in sound gadgetries.
Doro: I was responsible for the lyrics once again and had to write something about Hansi. No idea, till Tilo came up with the Orkus’ lonely-hearts adds and used the best quotations for the song. In fact there’s hardly anything our own work. Musically we were already fixed upon one style, because we wanted to produce a dance track (it was the time of L’ame Immortelle – already mentioned above – with “Bitterkeit”, In Strict Confidence and others). We used House-loops, which means we made a song typical for the dark scene using samples of a musical style totally opposed to goth stuff. We quite liked that!
Von der Welt enttäuscht wandle
ich durch den kalten, einsamen düsteren Raum der Zeit
Immer noch hoffend auf eine eigene Welt voller ehrlicher und tiefer Zweisamkeit.
Ref.: Ich glaube fest daran, Liebe, Treue, Ehrlichkeit.
Zu geben und viel mehr, Liebe, Treue, Ehrlichkeit.
Ich suche dich, weiblich, devot und jung, die mich, männlich, einsames
Gruftwesen verführt.
Denn ich – ich bring’s mal auf den Punkt – ich bin einfach
zu verpeilt, um ´nen Engel zu verführ’n.
["Ein Fall für Zwei" is the title of a famous German crime series and the lonely-hearts-adds-section of the Orkus - magazine, means something like: a case for two]
Disappointed of the world I'm wandering through cold, lonely, dark space still hoping to find an own world of true and deep togetherness.
I firmly believe to give love, faith, truth and much more, love, faith, truth.
I'm searching for you, female, submissive and young, to seduce me, male, lonsome goth (-person). Because I - just to hit the mark - I'm simply too daft to seduce an angel.
Tilo: A song with quite an “unsettled” background story. After loads of preliminary versions this is the very first we both can live with. Mainly because of the guitar, played by a friend of ours (Thanks, Sven!), which – among all “coolness” of the track – revived the song (in the original version we used a simple and cheap guitar-sample of an old synth). Besides I had Human League in mind, which tortured poor dendrite trying her best with the vocals. My order to sound REALLY bored gave her a real headache, but in the end it worked out.
Doro: As already said before, our influence was Human League and I was responsible for the lyrics once again. After me grousing about the music for ages Tilo finally got into the rigt direction and I managed to write some acceptable verses. We wanted to have something positive, but actually had no other nameable influences. The lyrics are quite optimistic and encouraging. The worst part was recording the vocals, which actually went quite well in our last version. It’s really hard to sound indifferent.
The city’s in a rush,
Phantom-shadows around me
While everybody’s trying
To win the race today.
I’m feeling small and lost
Indifferently dizzy
And I keep asking myself:
“What happens if I stay?”
Ref.: There’re chances around every corner
Which you can’t see
What if, on a day like this,
It’s you waiting for me?
There’s no aim, no direction
Like stray cats, we’re wandering
Sleeping where we find our place
And I started wondering:
“Like one single clown
Will never be found
If he’s one of a million
In this weird freak-show…”
I meet you for the first time
Today, just down the road
I don’t know what you look like
But I know you will look beautiful…
Tilo: Our youngest – he came into being, after we’d just returned from the Infest in Bradford, the gaudy party-atmosphere still sticking at us. First I found the vocals appalling, but after ages of mixing, “gadgeting” with multi-band compressor and different rooms I was finally sure it fits. Doro’s job was –as always – to make sure that I don’t ruin the song with an overload of sounds. This time I tried to use some decent techno synth stuff to refresh my sound.
Doro: Actually we started this song before Bradford and I had that “Muppets” of the British cyber-goth scene in mind while writing the lyrics. Tilo helped with the lyrics this time and the chorus is completely his work. Our influences were acts charactistic for the “darker” scene, future-pop projects like Apoptygman Berzerk, Covenant, Rotersand, or – apart from that, not typically dark projects – Fischerspooner and Op:l Bastards. The striking synth-track is my work and its sound unmistakenly influenced by old EBM-tracks. We created a synthesis of old and new, which is far from being perfect, but lives and therefore we quite like it.
Purple hair like candyfloss
An awkward staggering across
The polished dancefloor-scenery
Just look! How beautiful is she?
She flashes as she passes by
And with a gesture makes me die
And off we go, she takes my hand,
To electronic fairyland.
Dancing, loving on a trip through the universe
Dancing, surfing on a private data-stream
Dancing, loving around and round and back again.
Captured by her neon eyes
I see my passion chrystalize
Lazer-gazing she can see
Just what the future holds for me
Tilo: A prime example for an effective division of labour. All I did was complementing Dendrite’s cool drums and synth-melodies with pads and noise-elements – that was all I could do and say about it.
Doro: Tilo’s soundcard was causing trouble and while he was fixing his pc I started working on the track on my own. During that time I was listening to drum & bass influenced things like Felka, but also stuff like Console or Ms. John Soda quite a lot. That influenced this work, quich turned out to be quite rhythm-oriented and minimalistic when it comes to instrumentation. I like that. The lyrics consist of randomly chosen words haphazardly stringed together after we had point-and-picked them from a monolingual English dictionary. Our intention was to write nonsense lyrics and interpret them with certain emphasis, as if there was meaning behind those words. But seriously: does any pop-song say anything more?
Enjoy dancing, ragged romancing
Intrude on me, romantically
Discrete percussion, dunderhead discussion
Juicy creed, mistletoe defeat
Refr.: Let’s be hilarious, let’s celebrate our various weaknesses.
Cheeky remorse
Rotatory force
Re-patriote your senses
Reparable offences.
Kindness, driving on the fast-lane
Kickstart on a window-pane,
Erlenmeyer jet plane
Blindness, hanky-panky hangman
Blending digitoxins
Dilitant dilation.
Gunpowder measles
Hailstone teaser
Misty shuttlecock
Stiletto shock
Tilo: “Receive thy new processor” I spoke and because of tremendous laughing fits there was no thinking about serious working on this song for a while. But apart from these funny moments the work had something meditative and we even succeeded in giving it all quite a nice, relieving ending.
Doro: We worked really close on this song. Musically we were influenced and inspired by 2001 – Space Odyssey, Katharina Franck, or Rainbirds (Tilo listened to that kind of music a lot), Anne Clark, Covenant (old stuff), Dead Voices on Air, etc. The lyrics are my work, apart from a quotation taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book I, verses 249-255). It fite quite well into the atmosphere, although the song is not that negative, for it says that everybody’s responsible for his / her life and that life – be it good or bad – is only as good or bad as s/he wants it to be.
So rot wie Blut. Spuren in (im) Staub fangen die letzten Strahlen der Sonne auf diesem kalten Planeten. Ewigkeit und Sturz ins Chaos. Entropie ist nur ein Begriff. Wirklichkeit die Leere meiner Seele, Leere des Raums, leere Gedanken.
„Farewell happy fields / Where joy forever dwells: hail horrors, hail / Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell / Receive thy new possessor: one who brings / A mind not to be changed by place or time. / The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”
Schweben – mir fehlt die Kraft. Kraft ohne Wirkung, sinnlos, ohne Grund. Ich stehe alleine…
Red as blood. Traces in dust catch the last rays of the sun on this cold planet. Eternity and falling into chaos. Entropy is just a term. Reality is the emptiness of my soul, emptiness of space, empty thoughts.
„Farewell happy fields / Where joy forever dwells: hail horrors, hail / Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell / Receive thy new possessor: one who brings / A mind not to be changed by place or time. / The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”
Levitation – I’m lacking power. Power without effect, without sense, without cause. I’m standing alone…
Tilo: In the beginning we had a drum and percussion track which I had made with Reason. Suddenly Dendrite asked: “What are you saying? Haarnixen?!” (Haarnixen = Cabomba Caroliniana, fanwort, an aquatic plant we used to have in our aquarium) And suddenly I realised that my drums were speaking to me. The rest came into being somehow automatically, but I always felt something was missing. When Sven was playing the guitar track for It’s you I had the idea of improvising over Human Sushi and there it was!
Doro: Influences or inspiration: Twin Peaks! There are those scenes in the last episodes with the midget and Laura Palmer, they speak really funny (at least in the German version!). It seemed to be backwards recorded and forward played text. We liked the idea and tried it out. Besides that there is this alien-thing: We are surrounded by aliens. One day they occupy the Earth and humans are merely alimentary for them. Humans try to harm the invaders as terrarists, but play only a minor role on this planet. Human Sushi is our “coolest” song, at least for us, because it contains a maximum ammount of funny ideas. Unfortunately it took us quite a while to present it to our environment, because shortly after we finished the song we had a cannibalism scandal in Germany. It was all in the press, but we had not thought about things like that (One man had eaten another man according to his own wish – alive, starting with his penis) and were afraid that people could think we just jumped that train ( I mean: everybody was talking about that stuff back then, so we didn't want to!). So we waited till most people forgot about it, for we didn’t want to wake the impression that this was what inspired us.
To be honest, we don't know what we've been speaking in this song. Neuron was reading an excerpt from an aquarium-magazine and a passage from the bible, Old Testament, Dendrite was reading an article from newspaper on Joschka Fischer's visit abroad or something like that. The content wasn't that important.
Tilo: Our first song – Farin Urlaub (of Die Ärzte) just released his fabulous The Smiths-hommage “Sumisu” and we wanted to record a song for a friend of Dendrite, who also was / is a Smiths-fan. Why I sing like J. Mascis in this song? I just cannot explain!
Doro: The lyrics were a walk-over and consist of many true details told in countless telephone conversations. Influences: well, a bit of The Smiths, a bit of Farin Urlaub, a bit of Dinosaur Jr., a bit of folk-hippie-music, a bit of islamic muezzin. I had problems with my soundcard back then and this track is actually a hardware-test.
Es ist morgens im halb zehn,
Sie kann kaum mehr aufrecht gehen
Und auch echt nicht richtig sehn.
Ihr Kühlschrank der ist leer,
Es gibt gar kein Diebels mehr
Das macht ihr das Herz so schwer.
(wo krieg ich bloß Nachschub her?)
Ref.: Hebt die Gläser und sagt „Prost!“
Lasst uns trinken auf Frau Frost
Hebt die Gläser und sagt „Prost!“
(Wenn sie mal an Dingsda denkt
Dann wird sie ungern abgelenkt
Weil sie sich dann ihr Hirn verrenkt
Ob sie wohl mal ihr Herz verschenkt?)
Sie suchte lange nach’m Zimmer
Doch dann gab’s ´nen Hoffnungsschimmer
Fand zudem ´n netten Mann
Und darauf stoßen wir jetzt an.
(N: Obwohl, ist das schon wieder so’n Grufti?
D: Ach, nenenee, angeblich ´n Metaller, so Locken, sieht aus wie’n
Tier und so.
N: Ach du Scheiße!
D: Aber echt süß, weißt Du?
N: Na dann…
D. Da können wir jetzt eh nichts mehr dran ändern!)
It’s half ten in the morning
And she can hardly walk upright
And she really cannot see.
He fridge is empty
There isn’t any Diebels left [special kind of German beer, a bit like
ale]
Which makes her feel really broken-hearted
(How can I keep supply coming?!)
Raise your glasses and say “Prost!”
Let’s drink on Mrs. Frost
Raise your glasses and say “Prost!”
(When she’s thinking about You-know-who
She mustn’t be distracted
Because she’s cudgelling her brain
About giving away her heart)
She was looking for a room for ages
But then things started looking up
She also found a nice man
And on this let’s have a drink!
(N: by the way: is it one of those Goths again?
D: nonono, he’s obviously into metal, curly hair, looks like an animal
and so on!
N: Oh, shit!
D: But REALLY cute, you know?
N: Well, then…
D: There’s nothing we can do about it, anyway…)
All Songs written and performed by clubfungus,
* Guitar by Sven Bey
© 2005 clubfungus (Dorothee & Tilo Kley), all rights reserved.