A man is born lonely, lives lonely, and dies lonely. Alain Delon Summer 2001- my good friend Cem comes to visit me and hang around, but I tell him that I have to pick up something important quickly and ask him to come with me. ‘Quickly’ meant to drag him to the end of the …
Apocalyptic Gospel, Existential Doom & Blasphemious Grooves: The Story of Orhan Gencebay, Turkey’s Best Kept Secret
We will deal with another heavyweight of Turkish music today, one who refuses the genre name ‘Arabesk’ for being „inadequate and uncomplete“, and prefers labels such as ‘Progressive Turkish Music’ or simply: ‘Gencebay Music’. Orhan Gencebay has officially sold 80 million records in Turkey- which already makes him one of the most succesful artists on …
Kraftwerk Was Never About The Future, But Always About The Present
We were pretty sure that we weren’t raised in Liverpool. Our generation had to come up with a counterpoint to that… Kraftwerk was willing to relate to the past of German identity. Karl Bartos (Kraftwerk, 1975-91) If you ever plan to fly to Cologne and its neighbor-city Düsseldorf for its electronic music & ‘Krautrock’ heritage …
An Interview With Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Production Assistant
Dieter Enzenauer (78) was a production assistant and personal assistant for the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He worked on several classics of the New German Cinema, such as Nora Helmer (1974), Martha (1974), and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). We met for a conversation in Cologne. You started to work for Fassbinder in …
Nico and The Shame of Cologne
As much as I love my hometown, I can also hate it viscerally: for its provinciality and nationalism culminating in the city’s mind-numbing and degenerate carnival festivities fueled by the home-brewn beer called Kölsch, or for the mismanaged and ugly build-up of the city after 95% of it was destroyed in the merciless bombings of …
Simon Le Bon Chronicles 2 – Stranded
Part 2: The Crash
by Saliha Enzenauer / Yokomono
I opened my eyes in confusion. Where was I? Palms and sand and water everywhere. And why was I laying naked in the sand like a stranded mermaid?
More Light, Less Hocus-Pocus: GAS-RAUSCH (2018)
Eigteenth of Oktember The night falls The king comes The hunt starts Wolfgang Voigt, Rausch (2018) GAS is Wolfgang Voigt, co-founder of the legendary electronic music label Kompakt from Cologne, and Rausch (2018) is his masterpiece. On the cover art we see and on the two discs we hear the mythical German forests, birthplace of …
The Sex Gourmet – IF… (1968)
#7 Malcolm McDowell & Christine Noonan My fellow Sex Gourmets, today we take a look at Lindsay Anderson’s classic ‘If…’ (1968). Here, we have a rare exemplary of a sex scene managing the impossible limbo between half-way hinted sex and a pure animalistic attack. The semester has just started at one of the renowned grey …
Yoko Ono: Half A Century of Beatles Fans And Their Orientalism
My readers will know that no band on this planet annoys me more than the Beatles, an outrageously overrated band with decent tunes that function best as good children’s music. A band whose music and boring story is forced on us in an endless reproduction-loop through radio stations and music magazines which put the four …
Dark Side of the ABBA
(Abyss Beneath Bad Attitude) You don’t care about ABBA, but are still listening to the White Album? You better start to care. ABBA- the Swedish phenomenon that took over the world between 1972- 1982 with their insanely catchy songs. Ten years of perfect pop and sweetness performed by two couples in glittery space costumes making …