In Effekt
A few weeks ago I dropped into Schneider’s Buero to buy a sync24 cable for my recently acquired Roland TR606 drum machine (my little baby, expect some videos and photos soon!). Despite only making a small purchase I got talking to one of the guys there for about an hour about various synth nerd topics, and at one point he asked me what kind of music I make. (I do actually make music, it’s just not good enough for public consumption yet!) I answered by saying that this was a very tricky question to answer in a short amount of time, but if I had to pick my the one biggest influence on my music, it would definitely be Dopplereffekt. Funnily enough this guy had never heard of them, despite their being one of the most influential forces in electronic music since Kraftwerk, in this author’s opinion.
This Saturday, the 5th of July, sees Dopplereffekt perform their first ever show in Ireland. Their live appearances are rare so I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to see them and have flown over to Ireland for the weekend (where I’ll also be heading down to Lunar Disko’s birthday party afterwards where Alden Tyrell and Intergalatic Gary will be taking us on a trip through faraway disco galaxies).
If you’re reading this and you’re in Ireland, I urge you to come to the Dopplereffekt gig tomorrow, it’s a once in a lifetime experience to see my heroes play live! (Well actually they’ve been playing around Europe a bit more frequently these days so you may catch them elsewhere if you’re lucky, I saw Dopplereffekt myself last year in Malmo but it was just one member, the Vietnamese girl, this Dublin show will also have Gerald Donald on stage). They’re on in The Sugar Club, doors open at 7:30pm (it’s an early show) and I’ll see you up the front!
I won’t even try to begin to explain the whole history and connections involved in Dopplereffekt, Drexciya, The Elektroids, Der Zyklus, Japanese Telecom etc, but a great source of information for all things Drex and Dopp is Stephen Rennick’s Drexciyan Research Lab, it’ll take you about a year to read it all!
Stephen (Rennicks, not me, its confusing isn’t it!?) also has a six minute video being shown as part of the “Underground” exhibition running in the basement of Road Records (Fade St.), his video is called “Find Your Own Story” and to quote the artist it “takes Drexciya as subject and context as theme. To a soundtrack of Drexciya’s ‘Birth of New Life’ from ‘Harnessed The Storm’, I run a sequence of roughly 40 or so James Stinson quotes and titles of tracks and albums etc. The texts are all black on a white background and I hope on the surface level I have managed to design it to intrigue people not familiar with Drexciya and their world.” This Sunday (the 6th) is the last day of the exhibition so I’ll have to pop down before I fly back to Das Berlin.
Hope to see some of you Dublin people over the weekend!