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Rating:
It all starts in Munich, in August 1994, when the towering guitarist Stefan Koglek calls upon two old acquaintances from his musical childhood: Christian Wieser (a bassist who had accompanied Koglek in the jazzcore group Surface Tension) and Tim Hofer (already a drummer for Organised Noise, a goth-punk formation that had garnered considerable success in the local scene at that time).
It takes the trio just one year to release "Chopping Machine" ('95), an debut pressed in only a thousand copies by the small label "David Records". An album that perhaps finds its best description in Stefan's own words, in an interview from a few years ago:
"It's a different band that plays different music, darker and harder than now. Not a bad album, but just very much different"
Not a bad album, just very "different".
Different because it's dark, sinister, light-years away from that flowery-power mood, from that macroriffing of tube distortions that comb the hairs on the back of your neck, from that romantic taste for melody and the instrumental "crescendo" that characterize the band's more recent productions.
The sensation is really that of having in your ears the chewing of a tusked and metallic monster that churns acidic riffs, mangles blurry sounds, minces dehydrated distortions... and spits out eight long tracks in which dark and menacing funky-metal riffs mix, repeated obsessively like the gospels of an assembly line ("Why Don't You"), and disorienting sounds that evoke the impertinent alien probes of a 1950s sci-fi movie ("Chopping Machine").
Nervous and sludgy music, preferring unease over poetry: a "Blob" of limp and diseased rhythms ("Mud"), where fragments of oblique dissonances come to the surface, remnants of Neurosis-like claustrophobia and toolian regurgitations from a torture chamber.
A certainly imperfect, lengthy, and poorly produced album, yet not entirely devoid of charm, endowed with a dark brilliance. An album within whose folds one can already glimpse the germ of that eclectic guitar work that will make the fortune of the group in subsequent works.
Due to an almost nonexistent distribution, "Chopping Machine" will not achieve any commercial success. Just over a year after its release, moreover, Stefan will find himself grappling with the departures of Tim (off to Tailgate) and Chris. It will take until 1998 before the group's fortunes are revived by a hardcore drummer (Manfred "Manni" Merwald) and a bassist who had never played in a band before (Philipp Rasthofer).
But that, as they say, is another story...
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