C.O. CASPAR

"Reports From This Lunatic Asylum"

Hau Ruck! - 2009

CD

Berlin noise veteran C.O. Caspar, already known for his harsh outputs on Tesco and Hau Ruck!, is back. The new CD doesn't grant much more than its predecessors in terms of accessibility, on the contrary, it gets on the listener's nevers in more than one passage. If tracks like initial "Diese Seltsame G'schicht", with its gloomy mumbling of distant noises, the floating electronics with authoritarian sampled German voices of "Kaputt", the dark ambient of "Jetzt Geht's Los!", and the monologue of a dying Wojtila in the disquieting "VIVA Papa", even if largely predictable, do offer some enjoyable moment, the rest is unbearable, to say the least, completely centred upon boring samples of people speaking, coupled with pure noise and not much else.

Indeed, from track number seven on, the record seems to degenerate: first there is a series of distortions that makes think of the soundtracks used in Commodore 64's videogames ("Wrecked Organ"), then here comes Adolf Hitler himself, shouting with an effect-loaded voice (extremely original, isn't it?), followed immediately by noises of jet engines, fireworks (or, at least, that's what they sound like), and other voices joyfully chatting, thrown in and out without any apparent logic. Sorry for good old Caspar, but on this CD there isn't one single track truly worth a second listening. In the last thirty years, hundreds of records with sampled Hitler, popes and noises have been released, without counting the experiments carried on by avant-guardists (the real ones) in the decades before. In 2010, we'd like to listen to something a little bit more original and intriguing, if possible.

- Simon V.

Website: http://home.scarlet.be/~gui/COCaspar/Caspar.htm

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/hauruckorg