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Rating: "The Mighty Mistress of the Old School of Noise": in these terms, it is appropriate to speak of Christine Weyrether (straight from Düsseldorf), a legendary figure of the German industrial scene of the eighties.
In 1982, artist Weyrether was born in the punk band Zerfall, but it was the following year when she decided to go solo and started the Maria Zerfall project.
Always little or not at all interested in record production, Christine Weyrether makes music just for the sake of making music. And luckily there is a label like Membrum Debile Propaganda that has the good heart to resurrect years and years of home recordings, passed through the infamous four-track recorders, distributed (if distributed) in ultra-limited runs: decayed and putrid tapes destined otherwise to perish in the cosmic decay of things or in the debilitated mind of some stoner of the era.
And it's precisely thanks to Membrum Debile Propaganda that we can "enjoy", for the agony of our eardrums, these 31 sonic residues, which the label itself loves to define as urban-raw-electro-industrial.
The name Maria evokes a sense of innocence, while Zerfall is the decay of all physical and material things: in this oxymoron lies the instinctive and wild art of Weyrether, an art forged in the full post-punk era, under the annihilating shadow of Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, Swans, Foetus, SPK, Laibach.
An art in which not only the violence and morbidity of the machines converge but also the violence and nihilism of the most deranged punk: it's truly impressive to think that behind this delirium of sounds hides a representative of the (so-called) fairer sex!
Spartan sounds, hammering percussions, drones, echoes, rusted scrap and tons of tar: all the tracks move more or less on the same coordinates, in the form of 3-4-5 minute sketches that stumble in the shadows of a disused warehouse, where thick glass panes shatter with a crash; where crates full of bolts collapse ruinously to the ground; where the specters of those who were crushed by the machines still wander, prostrated by repetition, annihilated by alienation and the imperative of forced productivity.
Desolate paintings painted in the somber hues of coal and oil, blood and silicone; alienating noise phrases torn by a live and throbbing bass, at times so brutal that it finds no equal in history (the bass in "Das Geschenk" is an abyss: never heard anything so devastating!), at other times more considered to reveal itself as the only "melodic" soul of the compositions (think of the left-handed lullaby of "Der Mond", which could serve as a perfect soundtrack for a Pink Panther impersonated, not so much by Peter Sellers, but by Bela Lugosi!).
Little requiems of smoking steel, symphonies of rust and noxious gases, smoky industrial jazz poisoned by the infected whisper of Christine Weyrether.
Yes, the voice of Christine Weyrether: at first, threatened by the voodoo drumming of "Totenstille", we will have the impression of being attacked by a deflated Diamanda Galas from 17 straight hours of assembly line work. In truth, for the nearly two-hour duration of the collection (we are talking about a double album), Weyrether will remain attached to her non-singer dimension, outfitting the pieces with dark narratives, cold and mechanical phrases, verses, and phrases repeated with morbid clarity, asthmatic sighs drowning in the chaos and noise of hellish hardware that is Maria Zerfall's music.
And if anyway the lady will not fail to terrify us with some macabre find (the terrible convulsions in "Kopfkrieg" or the ghostly hissing of "Endlose Flucht"), from time to time she will decide, as happens for example in the overflowing "Seelenklumpen", to retrieve the declamatory impetus inherited from the punk era, but with that damned sharp and forked German that seems almost like Patti Smith (no!, what am I saying!) P.J. Harvey (no!, what am I saying) a Lydia Lunch possessed by Adolf Hitler himself!
The ideology? "Every ideology," explains the artist, "is an evil: my songs do not arise from any precise idea, my intent is only to transmute certain moods and atmospheres into sounds". And I would say that the intent is crowned in the best ways, through claustrophobic settings, extreme caricatures of horrible post-industrial nightmares: starting from the grotesque visions of the colossal "Metropolis" by Fritz Lang, to reach the post-war obsessions of a director like Fassbinder, the art of Christine Weyrether undeniably bears within it the weight of history, the lacerations, and the depth of a long tradition of angst generated and matured in German soil in the last century (beautiful the cover portraying her, headscarfed, in a worker's uniform and intense gaze, in a tragic black and white that finds the background in the aseptic metal sheets of a huge warehouse!).
In perfect consistency with the pioneers of the industrial movement, Weyrether stops at nothing, managing to incorporate and align in her music everything that responds to her nihilistic vision of the world (the sampled bombings in "Strand bei Mondlicht", the machine guns providing rhythmic extermination in "So Always Carry your Gasmask", the out-of-tune trumpets urged by the frantic pulsing of the basses in "Beisetzung der Illyrer", the tubes mercilessly hit in "Der Wind").
Terrible is the music of Christine Weyrether, who, to echo the words of the same label, constitutes indeed "the ruthless destructive messenger of the sonic Armageddon."
I repeat, we are in front of a legendary artist, who unfortunately does not enjoy the notoriety she deserves. Give her a chance: your eardrums, violated daily by Gigi D'Alessio and Laura Pausini, must be first avenged and then utterly annihilated!
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