Dieter Müh

Dieter Müh - Feeling a Little Horse
EE Tapes. EE35. CD in 7” sleeve w/4 cards. 150 copies.

Dieter Müh - Eponymous
Sentimental Productions LP. White vinyl. 150 copies.




Sometime in the late 90’s I received a cassette from Dieter Müh’s Steve Cammack that contained within it unreleased Panasonic recordings. As they were known before the Japanese electrical giant got all upset the result being the dropping of the ‘a’ and thus Pan Sonic, [a case of corporate bullying that probably worked in their favour]. I’d not had a letter from Steve Cammack before but knew that he was one half of Dieter Müh whose release ‘Feeling a Little Horse’ I’d recently bought from Mick McDaid, the man behind Lincoln’s The Mouth Label. Panasonic were signed to Finnish label Sähkö, Mick knew I was a fan and passed on my details to Steve. Thanks to a recent edition of Steve’s excellent Radio Muhmur show I discovered that the then other half of Dieter Müh, Dave Uden, had got to know Mika Vainio, one half of Panasonic, via the Bill Nelson Fan Club and had been given the cassette of unreleased recordings by Vainio. This was the cassette I now had in my possession. I think at the time I squealed like a little girl and danced about until my legs hurt. About three years ago the tape went the way of all tapes in what has become known as the ‘Great Tape Cull of 2014’ where a huge box containing about 500 of the things disappeared in to the boot of Andy Jarvis’s car at a gig and thence to the Filthy Turd who no doubt smeared his muck all over them.  

Mika Vainio didn’t survive 2017. He died in April aged 53. The same age as me and to say I was saddened doesn’t really cover it.

Panasonic and Vainio’s solo project ‘∅’ and most of the Sähkö catalogue at that time contained sounds created purely from analogue equipment. There’s was a sound austere, controlled, bleak, outer space empty, with woofer popping blats of seriously stark, surgically clean rhythms that grabbed your attention and made you fear for your speakers. Turn it up loud enough and you could make your curtains flutter. The perfect kind of music to emerge from a frozen Finnish landscape.

After what feels like a very long time its good to hear ‘Feeling a Little Horse’ again. It takes me back to those days of getting blind drunk in Lincoln after thinking it was a good idea to start drinking straight off the train at 11.30 in the morning. After Mick’s initial fifteen copies of ‘Feeling …’ disappeared it went to a French label who for reasons we’ll never know did nothing with it and thence to EE Tapes in Belgium who have done a sterling job of recreating the original artwork and putting it within a seven inch sleeve.

Regular readers will know that Dieter Müh are firm favourites here. I don’t know if Industrial Ambient is a certified genre or whether I made it up or I read it somewhere but its the term that I always use in conjunction with them. A heady stew of samples culled from porn films, atrocity videos and Ingmar Bergman films cut into noise loops, drones and crunching ritual rhythms. All this to the fore on the 37 minute long titular track that is a live improvised performance as laid down at the the Nottingham Old Vic in 1998. It passes by like the Death Star blasting Column One from deep within its bowels; crumbling noise, soaring diva like climaxes and those unsettling vocal samples. Being an early Dieter Müh release it lacks the finesse of the pairs later workouts where bowl rings, ethnic rhythms and Enochian invocations were incorporated but that rough sound certainly carries a punch. Around the halfway mark everything runs to almost silence and the words ‘God is dead’ are ominously spoken, a portentous moment and one that left me cowering behind the sofa. Not many bands have the power to do this.

EE have added a further three tracks, ; ‘Mühz’, ‘s.o.l.a.s.’, and the twelve minute long ‘Whorle’ all pulled from obscure comps, all from the same era and all fine additions with the twelve minute Whorle standing proudest with a full on head buzzing drone roar.

When ‘Eponymous’ eventually appeared four years later on the French label Naninani Recordings [103 hand numbered copies] their sound had refined itself somewhat; from rough noise loops to a denser more claustrophobic sound. The loops are still there but they’re sedate, unhurried, the grinding of bones into a tin funnel. We start with intermittent sunspot activity before the crack of a whip and an infants wail. ‘Monika Has a Throat’ has tortured moans and male orgasms, ominous drones, whispered demons. ‘Dumhome' proceeds at a slug like pace, a slowed-down ethnic drum rhythm while ‘R.I.P. 5’, ‘E.Coli Tsar and ‘Sebel’ are the degrading hum of dark machinery, last track ‘Anhosta’ is the emphysemic scrapings of slowly spun ridged pipe, its hollow whistle met with short blurts of static noise.

Ukrainian label Sentimental Productions have done an excellent job of making Eponymous a worthy reissue but its a pity that the limits of vinyl means a 14 minute track on the original has to be lost. No doubt to make up for this loss Sentimental have made 20 copies of Eponymous available in a black wooden box, each one containing an ‘elixir’. I’ll drink to that. 


[A few copies of Eponymous still reside at Cammack Towers. Get in touch via the email below should you feel the need]
  
Sentimental Productions

EE Tapes

muhmur.radio [at] gmail.com