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Her biggest wish

  Tobias

What is the true desire of the fanatic music fan? Everyday, she (if we may believe Nick Hornby, it's probably a man, but let’s just assume it’s a "she" for a change) is swamped with information on new bands, new stars, new albums and new songs, each single one screaming for attention, each one claiming to save her life, each one offering worlds of identification and of deep knowledge. To a fanatic, there is never too much interesting music out there. There is always too little. And still, a just recently released compilation by the “difficult fun” label could render just about all of it useless.

Let’s just have a look at what the fanatic music fan will find here. But not before she has pleasurably pealed the wonderfully heavy vinyl record from the plastic protection cover, which also includes a deliciously bizarre booklet, a yellow memo card (with the somwhat cryptical text “Up Jubilee Sod” printed on it) and a transparent strip of smooth paper containing the tracklisting for the album. There’s even a piece of robust cardboard with a cut-out, allowing you to see the little drawing on the center of the record. The fanatic music fan likes the incredible amount of care which has gone into the packaging and makes it stand out from about anything else she’s got on her shelf.

She then drops the needle and spins the black circle. With a mixture of amazement and amusement she must confess that, in all her years of musical education, she has hardly ever encountered a wilder mix. On the one hand, there’s a bunch of songs that hark back to the golden days of post-punk. If that doesn't tell you anything, think of bands like “The Psychedelic Furs”, “The Teardrop Explodes” and “The Fall” (and add an extra dose of madness). If that doesn’t tell you anything either, think of weird, but danceable beats, crotchety synthesizers and apathetic vocals.
Another part of the tracks is made up of experimental sound collages: “Internacine Slakes”, for example sounds like a wannabe-rockstar falling over his cheap drum kit after emptying three pitchers of beer on his own and then selling the recordings to his 15-year old nephew, who likes to produce “ambitious” industrial pieces on his home pc.
The final third consist of the “hits” – songs which should have been big somewhere on earth (even if it were only in Mongolia), but got lost somehow. “Medvedkovo” by russian project "Star Wars" is such a song, a bittersweet tale of finding love in ugly places.

All of this means a lot to the fanatic music fan: She can now surprise her boyfriend with a tape of the most out-there music and impress her other fanatic music fan-friends with this incredibly posh record and the brilliant, yet obscure music on it. But there’s more to this story yet. For even though she has discovered a fair deal of fascinating sounds and acts in the course of the years, our fanatic music fan wishes nothing more than to be able to get back to her childhood days. To the time, when she didn’t know anything of music and least of all about the bands behind it. She yearns back to be able to listen to that mix tape again, which she got from a girl from a higher grade, which contained all these brilliant songs she’d never heard of and which changed her life. She whished she could listen to them like she did that very first time she put the tape on – without expectations, without reference points and with an entirely free mind. And how she burns to feel that wild hearbeat again, when first hearing those songs, the short moment, when her breath stopped and she got lost entirely.

That’s where “Game & Errancy” is taking her: Almost without exception, the bands included on it don’t have any homepages or history. It’s almost as if they jumped over from a parallel world, just for one song. Everything is still possible and her fantasy starts flipping and flopping like that of a little child. The booklet contains none of the usal promo babble, but drawings, diagrams and dadaistic texts instead. Sometimes, though, there’s a little story. But when there is, it sounds rather like a fairy talel – “Mom” were alledgedly two 13-year old Berlin-girls, who recorded themselves during a single lunch break in school.

The fanatic music fan could not be more happy: With a single record, her deepest desire has been fulfilled: She has finally “hit the bottom” again – and reached a place of total naivete she thought she had lost forever. Occasionaly, she will surf the internet in search of some of the “Game & Errancy”-bands with all those strange names. But when she does find something on google, she’s afraid to click on the link. After all, she wouldn’t want to know too much about anything ever again.

Homepage: Difficult Fun