I Love Germans, me, I love em, especially when they sound like this…not sure about when they invade Poland though”…
…Were some of the words of wisdom I had gurned at me when AUSTRIAN duo Kruder & Dorfmeister played a rare set at the Revellers Stage. These words were of course geographically correct but he had a point about the music.
Dressed in sharp suits, white shirts and skinny ties, they looked more like croupiers at a casino than the kings of all things loungey. Based on a concept of K & D past, present and future, they started off with a pointless selection of their mixes from the mid 90s, dropping their lounge mixes of Depeche Mode and their classic Bomb the Bass Bug Powder Dust remix amongst others. All of them good but fifteen years old and for a duo who can hardly be called prolific, where’s the new stuff?
Encased in a Daft Punk style box and surrounded by screens showing eye scorching visuals of funky dancers from the 70’s, multi coloured TV static, custard pies being squashed into Dorfmeister’s face or just multi coloured lines flicking at you epileptically, the present and future sections of the show were stunning.
Showing off their new harder electronic sound they drop chunky techno tracks with the minimalism of mid 90’s output from the React label. Peter Kruder who has spent more his time producing harder edged electro music under the guise Tosca has steered the new material to something harder, the basslines wobble, the percussion crisp, the beats slick. If this sounds like the criminally overrated Simian Mobile Disco to you, it does but with such better understanding of what works on a dance floor and endlessly more inventive.
Flanked by two mcs, who raise hell in a Prodigy kind of way if they did dinner parties, one who belts out lyrics like a stoned Horace Andy, the other a dead ringer for Harry Hill dancing like Chas Smash who demands we let our minds unravel and let our minds go boom over sizzling dubby house music, our minds do indeed go boom.
For an encore they lead us in a karaoke sing along of The Beatles Let it Be changing said chorus to K & D, 16 Years of Madness, K & D and on this showing the next sixteen years are going to be even better. Now get an album done.
Words by Chris Todd
