Joke Lanz, the voice and the noise of the Berlin-based trio Sudden Infant, has done almost anything before becoming a modern day kind of a punk-dada prophet. He has worked as a garbage man, cleaner, caregiver, night watchman, farmer, record dealer, administrative assistant, bike messenger, chocolate manufacturer, technician and housekeeper, but he also perfected his turntablism skills, sound poetry and body art improvisation. In between, he found enough time to perform with many sonic alchemists, including Peyer Kowlad, Derek Bailey, Lasse Marhaug, Thurston Moore and Mette Rasmussen, and to lead Sudden Infant since the late eighties. And to collect many visor hats.
The new album of Sudden Infant brings Lanz diverse and versatile talents to very useful uses. You can adapt your lifestyle according to his insightful advice, inflate your spiritual aura with his anarchistic mantras, dance according to his motoric-industrial rhythms or just have some clever political lessons. Lanz and his comrades – bass player Christian Weber, known for his free-jazz collaborations with sax player Oliver Lake and Ellery Eskelin and trumpeter Nate Wooley, and drummer Alexandre Babel – guarantee that you will become a better person after listening to «Buddhist Nihilism». Martin Siewert of Radian made sure that these Infants would sound better than ever.
Sudden Infant are not going to spend your time. When all demand you to behave rationally – your mother, girlfriend, the system and even your stomach – the only practical antidote is, naturally, to «fuck rationality». Better do so while dancing, fast and with twisted, mechanical moves. Obviously, the biggest sin in Sudden Infant universe is the surrender to a sterile kind of hipster numbness when the «human head is shrinking», and the industrious infants demand that «In This Moment» you will «speak for yourselves», in a loud, clear and nervous voice.
Now you can understand these infants sheer disdain for terrifying tourists for-a-day who want «party all night» and feel that «life is right», to the consumer addiction of global brands (over masturbation), or the admiration of polished celebs like George Clooney, while these infants strongly recommend the spiky Polly Jean Harvey. And, of course, these infant know that their minds are not «all right», unlike other organs of their bodies, as long as they refuse any form of authoritarian, police-state regimes, as preached on «French Douche» and «Somniphobia II».
Fuck rationality!!!
Eyal Hareuveni
Joke Lanz (v, elec), Christian Weber (b), Alexandre Babel (dr)
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