Deluxe document of a legendary art-action by Joke Lanz (aka Sudden Infant) and Rudolf Eb.Er, two of the main players in the Schimpfluch Gruppe. An extremely limited pressing - only 200 copies – Akustische Aktion was initially put together to be sold at the Sudden Infant 20^th anniversary celebrations that took place in Berlin in April of this year. It comes pressed on 140g vinyl and packaged in a pro-pressed folded cover housed in a silkscreened PVC sleeve. Akustische Aktion is an audio documentation of a 1991 performance that saw Lanz and Eb.Er sit down to eat a meal with a microphone in front of each of them and the volume turned way up. I actually think this works even better as a recording than as a physical performance in that the sounds are so completely removed from their sources that you’re able to listen to it almost as some kind of instant composition. There are rhythms – chewing, cracking a can open, the clatter of cutlery on plates – and there’s the same obsession that runs through much of the Schimpfluch activities: making overt the previously hidden, bringing the inside to the outside, the interest in body sounds, organic rhythms, notions of composition and decomposition. Listened to without any context it sounds like a particularly abstract improvisation and the fact that it’s able to communicate on some many levels is testimony to the power of the group’s ideas and the rigor of their realization. An stunning art-action document, beautifully presented. Recommended.

New LP documenting a set of actions that Schimpfluch staged in Paris in 1996 and 97, including the infamous ‘spaghetti action’. The Schimpfluch Gruppe – the ‘abuse’ group – is cover for a series of affiliated artists who work in the liminal space between contemporary performance art, confrontational punk, avant garde composition and transgressive personal theatre. Founded by Rudolf Eb.Er and including at points Raionbashi, Dave Phillips and Joke Lanz (aka Sudden Infant), these recordings feature Eb.Er with Helena Greter, Dave Phillips and Doris Tomasoni. Minus the visuals it’s almost impossible to work out exactly what’s going on but as a stand-alone audio document it works well. One set seems to be based around violent hyperventilating chokes and groans building into overwhelming cathartic vocal violence. The second set is more extended and makes more use of dynamic tension, with long periods of silence populated by nothing but a ticking metronome before the introduction of tortured vocals and split-seconds of warped electronics gives way to an electro-acoustic pile-up with all of the avalanching power of the The New Blockaders. This is a whole other approach to ritual sound, with the primitive vocal poetics of Dylan Nyoukis/Blood Stereo and the body-focused investigations of the original actionists combined with a theatrical approach to avant garde performance and an energy and visceral power that comes straight out of punk rock.