A current mood image in postpunk, electro and jazz colors. In the band’s 43rd year, the Munich-based band is recording feedback from Chicago and London.
Volunteer Self-Control has given the haywire of this world a song on their new album, but in this one everything is nicely sorted: beats and bass are continuously building on a framework, and above them are keyboard pads that could come from a house track. Just a small announcement: “Topsy-Turvy World”. It becomes quiet in the center of this record; in the seven-minute edit, the band’s own dialectic is allowed to find itself. “Home Office” is the name of the next track, only a wandering free jazz piano permeates this new calm.
The popular team Hofmann- Meinecke-Melián-Oesterhelt-Petzi welcomes us in the 43rd year of the FSK band’s history, but in 2023 the jazz blues reference music of bygone days will be overtaken by current contexts. When cello, trumpet or trombone appear in the barren post-punk atmosphere, it should be a feedback that takes with it the younger jazz eruptions made in Chicago or London, conceived internationally and freely improvised.
But it’s also about looted art, Adorno’s hometown of Amorbach, the return to the department store and the French filmmaker Claude Lanzbach (FSK kneel before the Resistance). The band gives the demonstration system a new look in “The Parliament of Things”: “Affairs often have two sides, you can turn either way, war suddenly means peace, grenades Leonids, my sofa has a problem with me.” That’s what you want tap along and quote Andreas Dorau: “This is democracy, it never gets boring.”