Malaria!
Compiled 1981-1984

OST BERLIN!!! WEST BERLIN!!!

...who knows how many times the youth of the '80s, from the Italian "new wave," must have gone wild singing Ferretti's punk declarations over and over. Who knows how many times “Live in Pankow” was played on the old cassette players of those teenagers who, consciously or not, were witnessing the birth of an underground musical culture in Italy, with many nights spent in the streets drinking lukewarm Peroni beer after a CCCP concert. It was the first time!!... oh yes... it was truly in those iconic eighties that music here lost its virginity and an entirely new socially reassuring aspect that was previously unknown.

However, if the roots of "Emilia Paranoica" bore fruit leading to the entire Italian independent rock movement of the '90s (both musically and as a social concept of live music), then such fertility would not have been possible without a city... and this city is Berlin. The divided Berlin, with its wall, where heavy drugs were sipped like tea... the most multiform and experimental European city of the last century (not just musically) where Blixa Bargeld, after a hit, played with young Neubauten at S.O. 34 (today, according to a local gay friend of mine in Kreuzberg) and where at the bar you might spot a "cleaned-up" Christiane F. who once made music and love in Sentimentale Jugend with Alexander Von Borsig (better known as Alexander Hacke). The amateur singer Ferretti, returning from that Berlin, had tasted all that atmosphere and deeply understood the essence of that "Geniale Dilettanten" which summed up the irreverent and expressionist spirit of Berlin's youth.

Among the many bands that tore through Berlin's nights, one name should be remembered... Malaria!... strictly with the exclamation mark!... five girls who played together from the early '80s until the early '90s... Gudrun Gut and Bettina Koster still continue their artistic endeavors after the breakup of Malaria! Their music, like many other Berlin bands, is born from an urgent need for direct, violent, skewed, and minimal expression that favors an absolutely "material" relationship with instruments... certainly, Einsturzende Neubauten made explicit this desperate need for musical materiality with the fabrication of their instruments... but I believe that such urgency characterized the entire scene of those years. Despite Malaria playing with classical instrumentation and synthetic sounds, it is clear when listening to them, a radical way of relating to music that leads to an obsessive and tribal minimalism as a form of reclaiming a nature, an immediacy, that industrial progress had stifled. It's in the heart of "industrial," here understood as a social phenomenon, that Malaria!, along with so many other people, claim a possibility for humans to break away from mechanized progressivism. And I truly believe that this urgency and necessity made the initial seeds of industrial music distinctly superior to its later evolutions, as they were so naively violent, so naturally "industrial." The music of the five Berlin girls, however, remains much less daunting than many other experiments since there is some melodic-decadent residue that clearly expresses the new post-punk new-wave sound.

“Compiled 1981-1984” was released in 1992 to gather some of their productions that at the time made the two-meter-underground hellholes beyond the wall dance. “Kaltes klares wasser” along with “Trash me” are the two tanz-industrial hits: dry quarter rhythms, chanting melodies filled with noises and purely expressionist vocals. “Geh Duschen,” perhaps one of the best pieces, starts with bored sounds spinning around themselves and then immediately breaks into a straight train-like bass-synth rhythm over which, absurdly, a guitar plays a spaghetti-western-style riff (!). “Mensch” and “Dabo” are the two most dadaistic pieces, where we find insights (such as using radio stations in dabo) still used by the Neubauten today. “You You,” beautiful, is new-wave blasting that brings to mind drunken German goths dancing in a hole-in-the-wall club with broken glass on the floor from mountains of drained beers. The last track, “Gewissen,” encapsulates a bit of the essence of their composition where echoes remind us of “Crime and the City Solution” and the “Nick Cave” of the pears.

In short... a beautiful record, a radiography of an era and a music that continue to fascinate... absolutely immediate, expressive songs that, in a certain way, "somatize" all the spirit and the matter (...but perhaps more the matter) of that Berlin.