Attwenger - Luft [Trikont US-190] {Germany 1993}

Attwenger (formed 1990) is a musical duo from Linz, Austria. The group is made up of drummer Markus Binder and button accordion player Hans-Peter Falkner; both members also sing.

Attwenger's music is an unusual combination of Upper Austrian folk music and hip-hop, with lyrics sung (and rapped) in Upper Austrian dialect. Falkner often plays his accordion through effects pedals to give his instrument a distorted timbre similar to that of an electric guitar. Binder sometimes uses drum machines.

The duo has toured Europe, Zimbabwe (1993), Siberia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Malaysia (1995). In 2003 they won an Amadeus Austrian Music Award, in the category "FM4 Alternative Act des Jahres" (alternative act of the year). Of the group, the noted BBC DJ John Peel (1939-2004) said, "I have no idea what it's all about, but I like the general noise a great deal."

Attwenger worked together with Fred Frith, the Boban Markovic Orkestar, and Austrian hip-hop group Texta.

The overall style changed continuously during their works, their first 2 albums, most and pflug were basically cover versions of traditional upper Austrian folk songs, played in punk style, with only slightly changed or adapted lyrics, spoken as rap.

luft (Air) was the first step away from tradition, as for the first time they wrote their own lyrics, in the sense of Austrian poet Ernst Jandl, some of the songs dealing with environmental and social issues. In the music the amount of distortion and feedback became painfully dominant, making luft maybe the most challenging album to listen to.

song was the next step in the development of Attwenger. Totally free of the noisiness and punky elements, the album contains three songs clocking in at around 15 minutes, which can be best compared to ethno or dub music, and a six second word rap titled "Es gibt Wiederholungen" ("There are repeats"). For the first time plenty of electronic samples were used, and the lyrics were used rather as instrument than as carrier of message. The lyrics for each song consist only two or three sentences, whose words are only slightly varied (thus getting a different meaning), and repeated like mantras, sounding very similar to the accompanying mouth harp.

sun and dog represent another change of style, on one hand, the band returns to shorter songs, more aggressively addressing political and social criticism in their lyrics. The punkish style of the early days has returned to a small extent, but also hip-hop and trip-hop-elements have found their way into the music. The two albums also show increasing amount of melody, with some of the songs actually sung, rather than spoken. wikipedia

Review

by Thom Jurek

More self-conscious cleverness from Austria's answer to They Might Be Giants. Luft is a definite improvement over the band's debut, Most. There is a wider palette of sounds to choose from, the accordion is mixed lower in the overall scheme of things and the percussion is accented. Thank God they learned how to use synthesizers. There are some problems, however, the fact that all the lyrics this time out are rapped in a monotone voice to identical rhythms. There is also the irritating notion in places where songs seemingly end in the middle of themselves without warning. Is this a clever joke perhaps? Hardly. But there are moments that are very compelling here: "Schtroßn" which features a screaming, distorted electric guitar to take one's attention away from the rapping, and the tempo increases threefold before the track just grinds to a halt. Wherever vocal effects are used, such as on "Kosz," the effect is electric. Guitars, samples, furious percussion syncopated past the point of the tune's "melody," make it a mutant rock jam. Even when Attwenger resorts to pulling the dead horse of German polkas out of the glue factory, they at least muck things up a bit, injecting a bit of anarchy and sonic trickery to make it interesting such as on "Paf." Overall, Luft is a great improvement, but not quite there. allmusicguide