Even the most beat-forward tracks, “Oneironaut sei wachsam” and “Die Ratten”, sound like they are being ripped apart by centrifugal force.
Others, such as “Souterrain” and the finale “Nichts”, feel like dispatches from the ruins mentioned in the album’s title, pieced together from fragments that exhibit magnetic repulsion.
Once you know that Das Kinn (The Chin) is the name Frankfurt sound artist Toben Piel chose for his one-man band, this makes a lot of sense. He has spent decades using sound to provoke and disquiet, both in his work with theatres and together with Charlotte Simon in the avant-garde group Les Trucs.
The opening track on Les Trucs’ 2009 debut album is called “We Came to Destroy Rock ‘N Roll” for a reason.
Ruinenkampf (“Battle in the Ruins”) seems downright accessible by comparison, in part because of the record’s nostalgic air.
The album’s taut synth arpeggios, stutter-step percussion, and echo-drenched falsetto vocals all clearly invoke the early years of post-punk, especially its more avant-garde manifestations like the No Wave movement out of New York.
Piel’s most obvious touchstone is Alles Ist Gut (“Everything Is Fine”), the 1981 breakthrough album by the Düsseldorf band Deutsch Americanische Freundschaft (DAF), which showcased a muscular less-is-more aesthetic on button-pushing songs like “Alle Gegen Alle”, “Sato-Sato”, and the improbable dance hit “Der Mussolini,” which enjoined listeners to “Dance the Adolf Hitler,” despite West Germany’s attempt to suppress any content that could be construed as a positive representation of the Third Reich.
DAF wasn’t averse to pleasure. But they insisted that you chase it with a hefty dose of self-doubt: “Why do I feel compelled to make a ‘Roman salute’ on the dance floor?”
Ruinenkampf inspires similar introspection.
“Alle Rüsten Auf” conjures the spectre of an arms race – Aufrüstung is the German word for armament – that leaves little room for resistance:
Who’s not joining in?
Who’s also doubting?
There can’t be many, because
Everyone’s getting ready for war!
The opening lines of the title track exemplify the album’s pessimism:
Life is so empty
A garden of rubble
Remote work by the sea
Push-ups on the beach
Knife in hand
Waiting for bad service
Even when Piel’s vocals are difficult to make out, the way they sound communicates these sentiments. We get the impression that he is choking back indignation and disgust.
Together with the stuttering rhythms, the vocals create a feeling of great tension, of an existence wound much too tight. Although the influence of dub is easy to discern, these songs are the opposite of chill.
Nor are they indulging in the kind of cheap nostalgia promoted in mainstream media. Paradoxically, Das Kinn conveys nostalgia for the repudiation of nostalgia that made post-punk such a memorable exception within the music industry, a time when traditional chord progressions and beat patterns were abandoned in favour of experimentation.
That’s why thoughts such as “This sounds like DAF!” should be taken with a grain of salt.
It’s one thing to perceive a revivalist impulse in culture and another to ask hard questions about its implications.
The distinction is particularly important in eras when novelty is overshadowed by nostalgia.
This was the case for much of the eighteenth century when an intense interest in the legacy of Ancient Greece and Rome overlapped with veneration of modern classics such as the plays of William Shakespeare. And it is definitely the case today, when seemingly limitless access to art of the past couples with unprecedented ease of decontextualisation and repurposing.
People not only sense that, from a conceptual standpoint, there is nothing new under the sun but also fret that the hubris required to pretend otherwise is an impediment to pleasure.
We subscribe, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a narrative of decline that shapes our response to almost everything, from culture to nature to politics.
Although the MAGA movement has been savagely mocked by intellectuals since its inception, it merely represents a “low-theory” popularisation of a notion that has been circulating in elite circles for decades: the only way to make art great again is to return to a time when it was greater.
This mindset was already colonising the high arts long before postmodernism. And it manifested itself with a vengeance in the back-to-basics approach to rock music that surged as the Summer of Love gave way to a winter of discontent.
The post-punk era, when a rock idiom grown stale was revitalised by cross-pollination with the new genres of hip-hop, EDM, and dub, may have been the last time when novelty in popular music could truly be achieved.
To hearken back to that time, as Das Kinn does, is not to pretend that we can travel back in time to restore our culture to greatness but to remind us that it’s preferable to expend our energy among the ruins of a future past than to believe that the past can serve as a future.
That’s why the album is called Ruinenkampf and why it provides a richer, more self-reflexive experience than music that refuses to acknowledge that we have already entered another Dark Age.
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Photograph courtesy of Das Kinn. All rights reserved.
