When visiting my parents my mom told me I'd better look through some old stuff, bring what I wanted to save with me and chuck what I didn't need. The stuff was mainly a lot of comics, and also a lot of music magazines, all around ten years old.

It was fun looking through the music mags, especially Slitz, which was a respectable music magazine until it became a backlashing fuck-up in which women are portrayed as idiots and mere sex-objects. Thanks, Mats Drougge. Do read this article by Yelah (in Swedish) on how the Swedish AFA used Mats Drougge, former editor-in-chief for Slitz (and mainly responsible for its transformation into trash), to make "Shitz", a parodical poster. Anyway, I threw away most, after looking through them.

I also found a signed sticker for HATE, i.e. Peter Bagge's old comic that I recently bought a piece of, called "Buddy Does Seattle". Get it, it's cheap as hell (15 USD, people!) and highly entertaining. Bagge does get the lazy part of the human psyche very well, and it's not as gender-focused as you might think.

I also found the first number of "Pox", a Swedish underground mag that turned up in the late 80's. Loads of French and American underground comics from that time made my head swell, especially as I combined that with "Brök!" (another Swedish mag) and "Epix". I think that was my rit-de-passage into everything graphic and more than..."Garfield". My mom still loves that effing cat.

So now I'm reading my way through the mid-90's, Seattle mid-grunge. Watching Bagge make his characters whine about the downfall of music then, is like reading Robert Crumb whining when people don't get his love for jazz; it's beautiful. Thing is, it's semi-delicious when you recognise yourself in that pool of pity - on one hand you have people just like yourself; on the other there's the bitter after-taste in knowing you're 28 years old and are complaining away at how people should hone their musical tastes more, and not let their edge get blunt...damn! I'm bitter, dazed and old! Snigger, snigger.

I also found a few synth-magazines at my parents' place. By "synth music" I mean basically every bit of music (or, in some cases, non-music) that was made using synthesizers. Every person I knew who listened to synth music (who were, in Swedish, referred to as a "synthare") desperately wanted to be an outsider, a happening guy, who at the same time longed to fit in - with his or her own bunch of people, who listened to the same type of music as they did, of course. I was no different. Morrissey's lyric, "I wear black on the outside/Because black is how I feel on the inside", didn't apply to me - simply because I wore black because all my pals and musical heroes did.

Anyway, "Release" was a mag, basically a pumped-up fanzine, that I liked. Every month (or three) a new edition came out, telling me what was happening in the realm of what I thought was all that had to do with electronic music. Then I guess I started listening to Einstürzende Neubauten and all hell broke loose: are these guys synth? They're using pneumatic drills and rocks to make music? Hell, yeah! Their name was what hit me first. I guess I read it somewhere, heard somebody I liked name-drop them, looked them and their name up - it means "collapsing new buildings" - and then got hit with the explanation; Germany, where the founding members of Neubauten grew up, built a lot of new buildings after the second world-war. On the other hand, that "new building", that represented a particular way of life the German government (and of course, the allied countries that fought against Germany in WWII) wanted their population to conform to, was a way that some were simply not prepared to be a part of. Here's a Neubauten quote: "Destruction is not negative. One must destroy in order to build." I think it's a memorable quote.

I do, however, remember a quite down-putting incident that made me forget all about Neubauten for a while. Somebody told me to check out their "Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala". This made me run off and...not buy it. Instead, Santa Claus was to get it. Well, Santa didn't. My dad's explanation was: "They didn't have it at Mega." I went to said store the day after and sure enough, I picked up my copy without a hitch. I listened to it and quickly decided it was god-awful: I couldn't stand it, effing horrible and totally extreme music; imagine somebody scratching a pick along guitar-strings for a good five minutes while breathing heavily into a mic, and you hear rocks falling onto a concrete floor in the background. Hell and beyond! Dante's inferno? I wish! The lyrics gave a little, though, but not nearly enough to satisfy what I liked about lyrics in the first bloody place. I was into The Smiths a lot then, damn it! I finished the ordeal with throwing the album in the "unlistenable music" pile, but as I was a poor student, I couldn't bear myself to get rid of the album, so I listened to it bit by bit, thinking there must be something in it that made a lot of people love it. "One of the best albums ever"? Bollocks. It remembered me of a similar situation appx. ten years ago, when somebody on a BBS told me to get Brian Eno & David Byrne's "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" and told me that the album was so good, he'd trade me any one of the records in his collection if I didn't like it. I hated that freaking album as well - although this was before my near-death experience with "Richterskala" - and traded it for Nitzer Ebb's "Belief". Ha! I'd obviously won this one. Or so I thought at the time.

Little by little, that Eno/Byrne album stuck; I got hold of a tape copy from a friend, after thinking I maybe had missed something that I should care about, something that might pay off in the end. I ran the first track, "America Is Waiting", a few times, and those multi-rhythmic layers got me. Well, those, and there was definitely something about a bass like that, one that hits so hard it feels as if the inner core of my brain has been reached - sometimes you wonder what you're aiming for when you get off on an instrument sounding like a mix of an aural orgasm and a cluster head-ache. After running through it enough to actually know the poly-rhythms by heart, you know what happens - you let the next track run as well. Soon enough I'd started to run through the entire album, and I remember what happened when a dear friend visited me at home:

friend: Euch! What the hell is this shit? Turn it off? me, offended: You bastard! This is good stuff! You're insane. f: no, you're definitely the idiot here!

See? After jutting my cheek like that I realised I'd come to love an album I hated so fervently. Even if you forget the wonderful rhythms, that made the Talking Heads album "Remain In Light" such a genius one, this is far more multicultural work, bringing me into loads of other types of music without me really knowing it. Whaddya know? Remembering this episode just made me rip out that old Neubauten record and start listening to it. I think I first snagged on "Modimidofrsaso", looping that track over and over until I made my way to "Ich Bins" (which actually is the track before "Modimidofrsaso", but I couldn't get my head around "Zwoelf Staedte") which means "It's me". To make a long love-story short, I now know all songs from this album by heart. I bought a book containing selections of Blixa Bargeld's lyrics, called "Headcleaner". Beside the lyrics there is printed dialogue between Bargeld and Harry Lachner, where they discuss the lyrics. It is from reading this book that I caught up with a lot of what's deeply wedged in Bargeld's lyrics. Note that as with all great lyric, you don't have to nit-pick them or try to pry them open with a crow-bar to make the meaning of them visible; they're good to go! I'm just happy to know that "It's me." is the standard reply from any German police, when asked "Who is it?" by a person who cannot see them. "Richterskala" is truly a multi-facetted work. I think of Neubauten's music as true German folk-music, much as Kraftwerk's music is. I don't care too much about the avant-garde stamp, but as it's applicable to any art that's constantly prying new doors open, Neubauten definitely are about that. I say: check the album out. It's worth the initial swearing and spewing of hate at first.

Now, for those of you who've patiently waited for the catty part of this post, here's the link to an awfully freaky robotic cat! I haven't dared to watch the video of it, yet. Would you like one?