Second instalment with cool paste-on art sleeves in a hand-numbered edition of only 300 copies from Mama Baer, still one of the most original/fearless European artists to deform sound poetry and body performance. This continues the insane form of the first volume with vocals and tape/feedback pushed to the kind of emotional extremes of  Jandek’s Put My Dream On This Planet cut-up with hypnotic ‘songs’. Psychotic, intimate, emotionally unarmoured explorations of the vectors of female voice that’s easily the equal of Patty Waters, Diamada Galas, you name it... On white vinyl.

Kommissar Hjuler and his Frau, Mama Baer, have single-handedly reinvented sound poetry with a wild performative style that confuses arguments, vocal hysteria, power politics, goof-offs, Zappa covers and generally disobedient art while minting a style of vocal performance that is totally unique. Been looking forward to this particular release for some time, described by the duo as a series of folk tales from the Brothers Grimm re-worked in a way that is “not suitable for children”! But really, I gotta say, this might just be the best thing they have ever recorded, eclipsing even their amazing Ultra Eczema album. Their approach ranges across a bunch of styles. There’s the wild argumentative attack w/Mama weeping and singing while Kommissar shouts and howls in the background, the minimal almost Rev/Vega or even Meredith Monk approach with tense vocal atmospherics over a minimal, repetitive pulse, hypnotic sequences of breath and broken guitars and even some wild post-Junko eviscerations of lung power. In some ways it’s their most ‘musical’ release to date but it’s also completely fucked, especially when Mama Baer starts singing children’s nursery rhymes and blowing folk primitive melodies to shreds with alla the atomic power of the late Donald Ayler. Seriously, an amazing side by two of the freest spirits in the underground. Great sleeve art too, hand-numbered edition of only 200 copies. Another candidate for record of the year! Highly recommended. 

Another instalment in this on-going cassette series documenting vocal-only performances, this time from our favourite central European avant gardists Kommissar Hjuler and his partner Mama Baer. The tape starts out in ultra-minimal fashion, with Mama singing on the very edge of hearing before she bursts into a concerted almost Junk-esque series of shrieks and body convulsions and Kommissar enters with a cracked nursery rhyme theme that he repeats to the point of insanity while reducing Mama’s accompaniment to virtual hysteria. Personally, I can’t get enough.