Review Summary: A midi menagerie, as usual. But this time a good one.
Rudy Ratzinger, the creative force behind Wumpscut, declared in 2017 that he was finished producing music. But he obviously couldn’t give it up, and released another album only three years later. My ears tell me that his return is not just about the money.
Giftkeks is his third effort since 2020, and it’s easily his most solid release in a decade. (It also has my favorite cover art, for whatever that’s worth. However the meaning of the title, "poison cookie," is probably better ignored).
Of course, there are only four songs on this EP, so saying “most solid release” might not sound like much. But the hit-or-miss ratio on Wumpscut’s releases has been heavily weighted towards the “miss” end for a long time in the minds of many Electro-Industrial fans, and -- in this fan’s mind anyway -- a solid EP from Wumpscut is a big deal.
In an interview with theWritingDisorder.com, Ratzinger was asked how he composed music, and all he replied was “start with sound, go from there." To my ears, this fascination with sounds -- that is, tone colors or timbres -- started in 2001 with
Wreath of Barbs; the timbres on the previous albums weren’t nearly as colorful. I’m no composer, but I assume that starting with a type of timbre is a different paradigm than starting with, say, a melody or a rhythm or a set of lyrics. There are only twelve distinct notes that can be played on a keyboard, and only a handful of rhythms used in the genre (usually just one, 4/4), but MIDI software can probably generate hundreds to thousands of possible tone-colors, especially if an artist knows how to create their own.
And in the last twenty years it sounds like Ratzinger has tried to make music out of them all. The title track affords the best examples on this EP of his penchant for wild tone colours: Clapping hands, various kinds of beeping, a faint siren sound beneath various squeals like the outrageous squeal on his earlier song "Shrekk and Grauss." Mixed in with it all is a vibraphone, though you can't really hear it until the final seconds of the track.
Wumpscut’s compositional paradigm -- of building music around tone-colors -- led in past albums to some extremely minimalist, experimental, slow, and occasionally boring music, especially for fans of the ass-kicking industrial found on earlier albums like, say,
Bunkertor 7 or
Music for a Slaughtering Tribe. On
Giftkeks he has returned to a faster if less abrasive style. And that’s great for me because, though I enjoy many of his slower tracks, my heart belongs to the more aggressive style of early Nine Inch Nails and Front Line Assembly that defined Electro-Industrial in the early days of the genre.
On Remixes and Minimalism
What hasn’t changed is Wumpscut’s fascination with remix culture, another minimalist aspect of his art. Before the release of
Giftkeks, Ratzinger sent a message to fans via Bandcamp that read:
Hello Babies,
want to remix a new :W: song? Here you are.
Simply send your versions to
rudyr@gmx.net
The most suitable ones will be part of the DJ Dwarf 23, the others will be published on BandCamp
This was just a seriously fcuking cool thing to do for fans. An artist beloved by thousands says, in essence, “inject your own personality into my music, and I'll produce it alongside my name for everyone else to enjoy.” Bands in the remix culture have been sending each other raw materials for years, but this is the first time I've seen fans being invited to join in the fun.
The core of remix culture seems to be
not in the creation of polished songs, but in creating
raw material that inspires further music-making. Wumpscut has reveled in this process for years, releasing entire remix-albums -- called DJ Dwarf's -- alongside his main albums. Maybe that’s why so many of his later songs are fairly bland? Because the DJ Dwarf's are where we find much of the passion that is often not evident on the regular albums. And our album here,
Giftkeks, is the most extreme example in all of Wumpscut’s discography of the “raw material” model: There are only four regular songs, but
seventy-four remixes spread out between two DJ Dwarf albums, not counting the four instrumental versions on the EP itself.
Remixes aside, the tracks suffer from Wumpscut's typical over use of occasionally
maddening repetition in the choruses. Possibly that's why he included instrumental versions on the regular EP. Again, I speculate that this repetition is part of the general blandness on many tracks from previous albums: They're bland because they seem to have been created for the purpose of being remixed. And this album,
Giftkeks, is possibly the best of them all, for theoretical reasons if not for quality. I should think that
Gifkeks and its accompanying DJ Dwarf's would be interesting for any artist who is into making electronic music; music of
any kind, not just industrial. The three albums provide a positive cornucopia of examples of how songs can be used to generate new songs, practically
ad infinitum.
I'm not sure yet if the EP itself is really up to an "excellent" rating in my mind -- more like "great" given the repetitive choruses -- but to me it's justified when I count in the remix albums. Potentially even a new "classic" in my catalogue. Time will tell.
Remix album #2, which I assume is the one with heavy contributions from fans:
https://wumpscut.bandcamp.com/album/dj-dwarf-23-remix-appendix
