My Disco: Alter Schwede | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- To listen to My Disco’s new album -ever more full of ominous soundscapes, industrial machinery and crashing metal- feels pandemic appropriate. If thy flesh is diseased, cut it out! Gone are the organic, muscular guitars that these formerly Big Black-worshipping postpunks employed to crank up the sweaty tension. There’s little that seems biological in this wasteland, only desolate breezes and machinery whirring, clicking and thumping with eerie Deutsche efficiency, long after its operators have disappeared.

Certainly, the efficiency of the band appears to be growing: the wait between new album Alter Schwede and it’s predecessor Environment is half that with the one before. The commission from Melbourne’s Flash Forward Project, which has coaxed many great Australian bands out of pandemic-hibernation, almost certainly helped. I also imagine that a band who -eighteen years in- still manifest an incredible commitment to world-touring, are probably looking for an excuse to pick up where they were forced to leave off their 2020 travails.

In a way it’s like they will still be playing that older record. My Disco candidly admits that they’re recycling a lot of their recent material and Alter Schwede sounds very much of a piece with Environment. Listen to how the ambient background and rattling chains of Baustellenlüftung stack up against the same in Exercise In Sacrifice, for instance. The similarities actually speak a bit to the kind of band My Disco has become. The trio of Rohan Rebeiro, Benjamin Andrews and Liam Andrews come up with a collection of core musical ideas, unique sounds, which they juggle and blend like an improv band on stage. The records really only represent a single moment of the continuum, one you’re unlikely to hear repeated, exactly, ever again.

Again, just like the last record, this one was assembled by Boris Wilsdorf at his andereBaustelle studio in Berlin although more remotely this time: isolation prohibiting contact. The choice of venue is apropos, being the regular haunt of arty industrial legends Einstürzende Neubauten. I know you can hear a lot of dark ambient and industrial influences on Alter Schwede, but the enthusiastic experimentation with unusual instrumentation and found-sound percussion makes it a natural connection. It becomes well nigh unavoidable when you hear early album centerpiece StVO and the ASMR sibilance of its German oration; there’s not much else you could compare it to.

My German is non-existent, but I did manage to tease out that the narrator is actually calmly reciting the articles of Germany’s Road Traffic Regulations or Straßenverkehrs-Ordnung. These are incantations designed to stave off vehicular death on the autobahn such as -and if you’ll forgive my inept translation- “Anyone who drives a motor vehicle with a mass limited to seven-and-a-half tonnes may not overtake or damage any other if visibility is less than fifty meters due to fog, snowfall or rain.” At the same time it’s set to utterly clangorous industrial chaos that’s sure to  convince ignorant non-German speakers that they’re listening to the Book Of Revelation, instead of a rather long-winded car crash. The accompanying video is great, put together by Mclean Stephenson and Joel Burrows it abstractly fetishises the various components of an older model sedan. It moves the mood again, making you feel like you’re experiencing an uneasy wedding of Crash and Eraserhead.

Other tracks pursue that technocratic fetish, like the aforementioned Baustellenlüftung which translates to Building Site Ventilation and does indeed make a giant, distant extractor fan sound downright evocative, marrying it to those rattling chains, giving the final product an eerie reminiscence to that scene in Alien where Harry Dean Stanton has a fateful rendezvous in the cavernous cargo-hold of The Nostromo. At other times, My Disco seem happy to just head straight for the horror, titling a collection of rapidly phasing beats and metallic screeches Folterkammer, or Torture Chamber. I think that one also features an uncredited vocal from Austrian singer Berit Gilma, which widens the spectrum of noise to take in a certain, haunting sweetness. If you're looking for a little more beauty and, keeping things filmic to the end, the soaring melody in the synth of Third Place sounds like pure Vangelis, circa Bladerunner.

Alter Schwede means ‘Old Swede’ and I think it refers to a giant ‘glacial erratic’ boulder that was plucked from the river Elbe a few years back; another awe-inspiring artefact, created by forces that have little connection to human existence. I have little idea what the overarching point of Alter Schwede is, but, out the other side of this wasteland of industrial wreckage and fearsome monoliths, it’s hard to deny their forbidding power. Perhaps that could be the point: these inhuman constructions can only inspire dread in those who encounter them, reminding us that the cold uncaring wasteland will endure, long after ephemeral life is gone from the face of the earth.

- Chris Cobcroft.