JEAN BACH
Produktpalette April 2004
CD, ???
I love Jean, this guy is so crazy, he doesn’t even give a flying fuck
about the most basic things besides producing his evil bastards of
techno-tracks. I mean, there is this music, that is as much Aphex Twin as it
is Scooter, with a big dash of both Merzbow and whatever slick electronica act is all
the rage in this minute thrown in, but all in all Jean Bach doesn’t care
about styles, about a concept or about a general idea to hold things
together. He’ll start with what and how he likes it and he will end or
change or rearrange stuff at will or just leave it that way. One track might
sound like the one before with only some more reverb (or is that still the
main song) and the next might be a harsh noise-storm with some bass-heavy
bangs thrown in to act as a substitute for drums the way an earthquake acts
as a substitute for morning fitness, because they are too big, to noisy and
too irregular to be drums. So they are just more noises heaped on other
noise. The next track then could be a Hit Mix of Italian disco music. And
now I’d like to ask you: why the fuck not?
Jean Bach has been releasing under a variety of names, the most notorious
being littlebrutalravebastard, which says it all. On some releases he stays
closer to one style, not on “Produktpalette April 2004”. This one offers
various kinds of noise and harsh electronic music (we used to call hat power
electronics back in the day), tracks that sometimes scream and rage and call
hailing thunderstorms from the heavens, and at other times sound like
intricately mixed layers of digital trash and electronic errors. There is
even some straight forward rave-techno, but again the kind that will clear
any regular dancefloor within minutes, because it is just too weird or too
short and will change into something crazy within no time. Then more
4/4-beats and more noise at the same time. During the last third of the CD
JB presents you his world and it is a hard one indeed, filled with some
obsessions that are not usually admitted by musicians these days, such as
tv-spots for sex-phones (we’ll get to that again), radio and disco-pop
from eastern Europe including the Balkan, weird noises and the likes. Are
you strong enough to dig that?
Next to the music there are three more great things about Jean Bach: One
is his humour. Just check out the cover of the woman drawing her trolley
into the doorway to what might be translated as “fresh meat chow –
intestines wholesale” – do you think she buys or sells? Or the samples
throughout the record, from crazy talk to tv-spots for sex-phonelines. And
because the humour of JB is such that he really drives a joke into its
ground until it is really really dead and done and then he will do some
more, that’s why there are a lot of those. And I really mean a lot. The
second thing is how he doesn’t give a damn about anything. Sure, give me
no contact address, no songtitles, no information whatsoever to your
release, I’ll just make something up, like “my favorite track on this CD
is the disco-banger “floorfuck #3 in d-minor with added parts for
industrial machinery”” or something. Maybe Jean Bach goes by the old
saying: “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” Sure, you can write care of
me. The third thing that should be mentioned is, that he has written stuff
for Cracked as well. From a great piece about Italian Disco back in the old
times when Cracked was still copied on paper to the review of the new CD by Dragana Mircovic
(I am sure, he was dead serious with it.)
