In the same way in which one can speak of Renaissance men, one can also refer to Industrial ones. Our Hamburg-based pal Ben Atkins is one. He’s our guest today, and after you check out the below, you’ll want him back. Check out Set in a Distant Present to find out what’s going on.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation provides us with much. Extruded via hardware and diplomacy, trans-oceanic channels have worked for more than fifty years to conduct experience across all sectors. Historically underwritten by the dread threat of nuclear assault or the direct Horror of proxy warfare, the situation now extends as far as the concept of ‘courageous restraint’, the newest terms of the Afghan war. From the tunnels under the Edgeware road right out to Diego Garcia, this group has reach.

Terrible Eagle’s EP TE313 foregrounds rhythm in the encounter with the organisation’s newer routes. From their base at one end of the old Hamburg -America line, they have made a record on which the drum tracks assert a heavily controlling pressure. At the outset of the track ‘End in Suicide’, rotor blades lay out the framework for a series of coercive drum patterns which neither break nor relent. This is an elaboration of the motorik away from the landscape of the Wirtschaftswunder and into a more oppressive present. It is as driven as any of Klaus Dinger’s lange gerade rhythms but heavier in aspect, with returning guitar phrases set into a harsher timbral scheme. The sounds themselves are close to the standard industrial reference points (EN, Test dept), but Terrible Eagle are stricter with the clatter.

Any looseness comes from the newer sounds of our computer world; there is no surplus colour, but a background waste of aircraft wash and sampler compression around the ever working rhythm. These noises off are the noises of pilotless drones, white phosphorous and the targeting of communications infrastructure. Through the long track, the effect is to rework the senses.

Terrible Eagle- End In Suicide

The European Coal and Steel Community is the organisation to set against the second track, ‘Brothers’ by Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft. Established very shortly after Nato, the founders hoped to make war ‘not only unthinkable but materially impossible’. This was to be achieved through the harnessing of heavy industrial output and the dismantling of trade protections. Fraternité had ever been the most ambiguous of the Jacobin demands and was now given some supranational-structural expression. By the time Gabi and Robbie had made their record in 1985, these structures were more fixed, as the European Union; the question of brotherhood, however, remained as troublesome as ever.

Earlier DAF arrangements had been both spare and rough, with a disturbing atmosphere bolstered by dilettantish investigations of the Roland 303 and the ideological disorientation of a name with echoes of both the Nazi DeutscheArbeitsFront and the strange relationships of the Marshall Plan. By 1984/5, the stern pantomime had been largely replaced by the freer and more exuberant DAF pictured on the sleeve and seen in the video’s desert, ready to work out an affirmative cycle of questions, declarations, affirmations.

‘I made a promise/you made one too/ I said I love you/do you love me too/ Like brothers do’

‘Me and Robbie, we are brothers!

…

together we can play/ play like brothers do’

The affirmation does always return, and always emphatically, ‘brother’ responding to ‘love’ responding to ‘brother’. However, it is set off by doubt and nervousness in the questioner’s voice, which never holds out but helps introduce a kitsch tension. Against this, other vocal sounds (ugh! Hurrh! Hoagh!) reiterate the emphatic sense, an exaggerated and positive re-purposing of the vocal energy found earlier (cf ‘Alle Gegen Alle’, ‘Der Mussolini’). Love is reflected and reflected in an ever returning reel, but the residue is not entirely dealt with.

Another strengthening occurs at the level of production, with a toughened kick and snare locked in against a bassline that bumps and plays off each kick. It is a setup familiar from DAF associates Liaisons Dangereuses, whose ‘Los Ninos de la Parque’ counts among those few European exports which helped shape the situation in Chicago. The components of ‘Brothers’ were put together only slightly later, but it already feels closer to House. This feeling is the final supportive transatlantic link.

Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft- Brothers

The last track comes out of the geography that would become the territory of the most recent European war. Borghesia were contemporary with the Neue Slowenische Kunst, famous Slovene interrogators of national and supranational organisation, fascism, non-aligned socialism and NATO. Borghesia’s critique works here through a plattenbau techno city, SM and VHS. This video-track is ‘on’.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with motorik