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Watch Anklepants freak the fuck out (and get interviewed) on German television
Credit: Torsten Solin
Oh, Anklepants, how we’ve missed you. Recently, our favorite penis-nosed breakcore lunatic stopped by a German TV show called the Network Awesome Show to perform the song “Ilikeyourfaceheadshoesanddick” and give an interview with, randomly, a muppet bat and a robot/crash test dummy. Oh, and some American dude in one of those pointy Asian hats.
You can watch both the performance and the interview below. We don’t want to give away every revelation bomb Anklepants drops in the interview, but we will tell you this: We still don’t know why he has a penis on his face. Maybe some mysteries are best left unrevealed.
In other Anklepants news: After hanging out in Berlin for some time, the man behind the penis is returning to Australia. He’s also releasing a new 12-inch single soon on Love Love Records. We’ll be sure to let you good people know when it’s out. Yes, even you fuckers who didn’t pledge money to the face-tar.
New Igorrr album “Hallelujah” should be a fitting soundtrack to the end of the world
As I’m sure you’re all aware, the world is going to end this Dec. 21st. But while you’re stocking up on guns and MREs and dodging flaming meteorites and whatnot, you should really take a few minutes to download Hallelujah, the new album from Igorrr. Assuming your Internet’s still working. If it’s not, you might have to go loot your local record shop instead.
Igorrr, who mixes breakcore, death metal and Baroque classical music, is probably our favorite artist we discovered in 2012. His previous album, Nostril, was a raging, ADHD mindfuck of a record, but Hallelujah promises to be even crazier, as the mad Frenchman known to his mom as Gautier Serre ups the ante with even more complex arrangements, aided and abetted by live guest musicians including members of Mayhem, John Zorn’s band and Vladimir Bozar ‘n’ ze Sheraf Orkestär. I’d never heard of that last one either, but they’re also from France and they sound like this. Oh, and Gautier’s pet chicken shows up a few times, too. It all bodes extremely well for the weirdness factor on Hallelujah, I’d say.
Igorrr’s label, Ad Noiseam, is previewing two full tracks, “Tout Petit Moineau” and “Vegetable Soup,” on their website, along with a few other snippets. But we’ll leave you with the tracklist and the official album trailer, which stars Igorrr’s mom. It makes me so fucking happy that over 10,000 people have watched this in just 10 days that I don’t even know what to do with myself.
Hallelujah tracklist:
1. Tout Petit Moineau
2. Damaged Wig
3. Absolute Psalm
4. Cicadidae
5. Vegetable Soup
6. Lullaby for a Fat Jellyfish
7. Grosse Barbe
8. Corpus Tristis
9. Scarlatti 2.0
10. Toothpaste
11. Infinite Loop
P.S. Shout-out to our buddy Ian Frost for sharing this blessed news with us. Guess we now know what to get you for Christmas, Ian!
Otto Von Schirach is coming, Europe! How do you say “Meng” in German?
Not only does Otto Von Schirach sometimes dress like an old German naval commander—he even visits Germany in person occasionally. Even as I type this, our favorite Miami booty breakcore lunatic is no doubt tearing it up in Berlin at a label night for Monkeytown Records, home to his latest and funkiest LP, the unstoppable Supermeng. If you’re there, tell him “Wie geht’s?” for us. Also, why the fuck are you reading our blog at a label party? Go dance or something.
Here are Otto VS’s other remaining European tour dates—presented, in proper Euro fashion, with the date first, then the month. Mostly because we’re too lazy to change the formatting we just copied off Otto’s Facebook page.
16.11 berlin @ berghain / panorama bar (monkeytown label night)
17.11 chemnitz @ weltecho
18.11 hamburg @ golden pudel
19.11 vienna @ rhiz
21.11 linz @ quitch
22.11 graz @ forum stadtpark
23.11 maribor @ zavod udarnik
24.11 ljubljana @ ch0
25.11 vittorio veneto @ codalunga
28.11 rome @ dal verme
29.11 faenza @ clandestino
30.11 milano @ bitte club
01.12 brussels @ M4 / autumn falls festival (+alec empire)
03.12 lyon @ sonic
05.12 paris @ la mecanique ondulatoire
06.12 marseille @ l’embobineuse
07.12 lille @ tri postal
08.12 san gwann @ liquid club
14.12 den hague @ paard van troje / state-x new forms
15.12 liege @ inside out club
Help Anklepants make the Face_tar a reality
I gotta say, I am feeling pretty damn good about myself today. I just ponied up $10 to one of the worthiest causes I know. No, not defeating Mitt Romney, although I really should give the Obama campaign ten bones just as a thank-you for the 83,792 emails they’ve sent me over the last six months. My wife writes me less.
No, I parted with my hard-earned ducats to help one of my favorite weirdos, Anklepants, build a new instrument called the Facé_tar™. And you should join me, because the man creature also known as Reecard Farché is, as of this writing, a little (okay, a lot) short of his goal of raising $1,875 for all the necessary components. So he needs a little generosity and a little help getting the word out.
The Facé_tar™ is explained, sort of, on the Indiegogo page Reecard/Anklepants creator Josh Head has built for his fundraising campaign. I say “sort of” because, like Anklepants himself, this Facé_tar thing is a little hard to explain. Here, I’ll quote Josh/Reecard/AnkleP’s:
This hybrid Robotic instrument will be the second character (along side Reecard Farché) for the future Anklepants live show.
The body of the guitar (A large lip syncing animatronic creature /puppet made of silicone and fibreglass) with a large mouth , moving eyes and very expressive face , delivering lip synced vocal performance and a range of interaction with Reecard Farché as he carries and plays the instrument like some kind of deranged and loving ventriloquist, bag pipe player / guitarist /pied piper.
If that still doesn’t make sense, there are some concept drawings you can check out here. Still can’t wrap your head around it? Fine. Just know that Josh Head, in addition to being a pretty killer breakcore/IDM/drum ‘n’ bass musician, is an amazing designer of prosthetics and animatronics who, among other things, worked on this creature. And this one. Oh, and his headpiece for Anklepants has an animatronic penis-nose that moves in time to the music. So your money will almost certainly be put to good use.
As with Kickstarter, it’s a little misleading to describe Indiegogo contributions as “donations.” Depending on how much you pitch in, you can get any number of Anklepants goodies in return, from a digital WAV copy of his latest album to your very own silicone cast of the full Anklepants “facéhead.” (It’s a bust, not a headpiece, so sorry—you can’t wear it to your next DJ gig. Make your own damn penis-nosed prosthetic!)
We’ll leave you with that Indiegogo link one more time and a little taste of the Anklepants live show. Just imagine this shit with the added bonus of a guitar that’s also a face!
New Otto von Schirach video “Salpica” makes us wanna wake up in a Miami gutter
¡Escuchame, weirdijos! (That means “Listen up, weirdos!” High school Spanish, baby.) Otto von Schirach has released a new video for his track “Salpica” and it’s really making up wanna hop the next flight to Miami so we can party it up with bearded trannies, chickens, guys in wheelchairs and Cuban mamis with a Bermuda Triangle’s worth of cleavage. Seriously, Otto clearly knows how to have a good time. And save some serious coin on his gangsta grills. Why get diamond-encrusted platinum when tin foil looks just as good?
“Salpica” is from OvS’s just-released album Supermeng, which is available now from Monkeytown Records. Get that shit. It’s the most fun you can have without waking up in a Miami gutter cover in lip gloss and STDs.
Igorrr
We’ve been doing this blog for nearly three years now, so we’ve gotten pretty jaded. When a reader writes in and describes an artist we’ve never heard of as “totally insane” and “makes you laugh and cry at the same time,” we brace ourselves for disappointment. But reader bbawck was not exaggerating about this Igorrr guy. In fact, this might be the most original music Jake and I have heard all year.
Igorrr is the solo project of a French producer named Gautier Serre, who is also one-half of a death metal band called Whourkr. In simplest terms, Igorrr is a fusion of breakcore, death metal and Baroque-inspired classical music. Igorrr even released an EP in 2010 called—wait for it—Baroquecore. At least he didn’t call it Baroquen Beats.
But here’s the thing: We’ve been listening to Igorrr’s stuff for the past several days and there is literally no way to categorize it. A single track might toss in a little Texas two-step, an old-timey jazz sample, some cut-up drum ‘n’ bass beats, a smidgen of trip-hop and industrial, some pretty ambient piano and an operatic baritone. It’s like Mike Patton, Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin and Kerry King made an album together. Except it’s all one guy. It’s amazing.
Serre self-released two Igorrr albums in 2006 and 2008, but he really only began to get attention for this stuff in 2010, with the release of the album Nostril and the aforementioned Baroquecore EP. Since then, he’s been building a good-sized fan base around Europe and parts of the Middle East (he seems to be very popular, randomly, in Lebanon). As far as we can tell, he remains virtually unknown in the U.S., but hopefully that will change soon.
Ready for what one YouTube commenter astutely describes as the “ultimate combination of pagan folk, jazz, dance, techno, classical, hardcore and death metal”? Here you go.
You might also like: Otto von Schirach, Anklepants, Gangpol & Mit
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New Otto von Schirach album “Supermeng” coming this August
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a birdg! It’s a planeg! It’s Supermeng!
That’s right, kids: breakcore freakazoid Otto von Schirach has a new superhero identity, and it’s really hard to say out loud. Supermeng is both the title of his next album, coming this August, and the name of his new all-powerful alter ego, which according to this press release right here was created by a “secret fluid injected into his third eye.” Are third eyes less squishy and viscous than regular eyes? No? Then that must’ve hurt like a motherfucker.
Supermeng is coming out on Monkeytown, the label run by Otto’s fellow dance music weirdos Modeselektor, which gives us an excuse to play this post out with one of our favorite WTF videos, “Evil Twin,” a collab betwixt Von Schirach and the Modeselektor guys. Before we do that, though, check out these track previews from Supermeng. Sounds like OvS is gettin mad funky this time out. And yes, I just used “mad” and “funky” in the same sentence. This music has that kind of effect on me.
OK, now that that’s out of the way, behold the awesome power of “Evil Twin.” Fun with Quicktime!
New Anklepants album available for free download
Good news for fans of our favorite penis-faced EDM producer, Anklepants: For a limited time, he’s making his brand-new album, Social Patching and the Pixel Pagent Facéd Boy, available as a free download on Bandcamp. Go get it while you still can, and if you dig it, be sure to grab the free bonus track, “Bellofacé,” which he just added yesterday. Yes, the man’s generosity knows no bounds. Now, who’s hungry for grapes?
Otto von Schirach
(Photo by Sarah Sitkin)
Today’s weird artiste has been suggested to us by several folks over the years, most recently a reader named voodoojuice (not his real name, we assume…otherwise, he probably has to repeat it several times at parties). He’s a breakcore artist from Miami named Otto von Schirach, and even in a genre of music that’s pretty much all lunatics, he stands out as being extra wackadoodle.
Before we talk about Otto and his mythological origins, let’s back up a sec and talk about breakcore. A mid-’90s offshoot of hardcore techno and “IDM” (aka “intelligent dance music”…one of those genre names so obnoxious, I can only type it in quotation marks), breakcore basically lays an unholy mishmash of distorted kick drums and snare hits, gangsta rap and horror movie samples, dive-bombing bass lines and death growl vocals over breakbeats that have been chopped up and sped up to the point where the only logical way to dance to them is to fake an epileptic seizure. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
You can get a peek at several breakcore artists in action—including Von Schirach—in this excellent video, which was apparently done for some German television show. It’s mostly in German, but you don’t really need to understand what anyone’s saying to figure out that these breakcore producers and their fans are fucking nuts.
So, back to Otto von Schirach. According to his official bio, Von Schirach was born in 1978 in Miami or possibly dropped off by aliens and introduced into a Cuban/German family that included santeria practictioners and possibly wolves. He acquired his first drum machine in either 1991 or 1995, possibly from a neighborhood crackhead. Soon thereafter, he began making beats, which were decidedly breakcore-esque but slowed-down and strongly influenced by Miami booty bass, goregrind and IDM O.G.’s like Aphex Twin.
Von Schirach’s first big “break” (breakcore pun!) came when he got to open for the industrial band Skinny Puppy in 2003. According to one bio, “He scared the living shit out of all the Skinny Puppy fans night after night with his 35 minute, 3 costume change, ear punishing dance party.” That might sound far-fetched, but we’ve met a few Skinny Puppy fans and underneath all the black clothing and piercings, they’re a pretty skittish bunch. So it’s quite possible that Otto’s unique “spin” (DJ pun!) on breakcore really did freak them out.
That spin, as heard on albums with fantastic titles like Global Speaker Fisting and Oozing Bass Spasms, combines elements of (and again, we’re just quoting from the official bio here) “Electro Bass Noise, Gore Grind, IDM Glitch, Calliope, Breakcore Gabber Jungle, Gangsta Rap.” And as if all that weren’t enough to blow your mind, he’s also been known to perform in a superhero costume. We foresee a future Sir Ivan collaboration.
P.S. The track in the clip below is called “Teabagging the Dead.” Awesome.
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