Swiss, Berlin-based vocalist-turntabalist-erlectronics player-sound artist Joke Lanz’ Zungsang (tongue singing)  is a rework, remastered version of a limited edition of an 80-copy C-30 cassette (Vice de Forme, 2021), now released as an expanded red vinyl with four extra pieces. The new album comes with new artwork by Pole Ka, and graphic design by Lasse Marhaug. The prolific Joke Lanz is known as the man behind the solo work/band Sudden Infant that blends body performance, turntablism, free improvisation, musique concrète, and noise.

The album is dedicated to Swiss iconoclast artist Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), one of the first Swiss artists who was associated with the Art Brut – outsider art label, who spent the last 35 years of his life in a psychiatric hospital in Bern, where he experienced intense hallucinations. Some of Wölfli’s images were incorporated into idiosyncratic musical notations, which looked aty first like a purely decorative affair, but later developed into a real composition which Wölfli would play on a paper trumpet. His work inspired contemporary composers like Danish Per Nørgård and American Terry Riley.

Zungsang is a titled after one of Wölfli’s puzzling images. It corresponds with Wölfli’s psychedelic hallucinations and suggests a dark but seductive, surreal, and hallucinating journey of its own, coupled with Joke Lanz’ colorful, subconscious memories and nightmares. The fourteen short and haunting pieces of sound poetry use cut-and-paste of seemingly unrelated voice and sound samples (following Igor Stravinsky’s advice that a good composer «does not imitate; he steals»), but Joke Lanz edits them in an unpredictable, subversive, and thought-provoking manner. Zungsang offers Joke Lanz’ visitor from outer space-like, sharp, and ironic observations of idiosyncrasies and situations in our modern society.

Eyal Hareuveni

Joke Lanz (voice, electronics), Additional voices, bass, and percussion by Dominik Gysin, Philippe Nauer, Meret Matter, Brigitte Wilfing, Christian Weber, Alexandre Babel