Prinzhorn Dance School
Prinzhorn Dance School

Sharp geometric lines, an austere aesthetic with no concessions to unnecessary frills.

It works in subtraction.

"Less is more" said Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who viewed architecture "in its simplest form, as being anchored to absolutely functional considerations".

This is how the Prinzhorn Dance School operates, developing a concept of music of brutal simplicity, indebted to a self-indulgent post-punk and no-wave aesthetic, leaving no escape. A concept of music where the voids count more than the filled spaces: hypnotic bass as a guideline, pounding metallic drums, an oblique, sharp guitar, and at times visceral blues hints. The two voices of Tobin Prinz, on guitar and Suzi Horn, on bass, alternate like slogans in brief, simple phrases, elegantly schizophrenic but melodic in their own way: you will find yourself humming some of their pieces even after the first listen because this dance school, tagged Prinz&Horn, certainly does not lack appeal or rhythm...

And just as architecture for Mies Van der Rohe "can ascend through all levels of consideration to the highest sphere of spiritual existence, into the realm of pure art" here too the music, bare, basic and stripped of electronic tricks aims to be art: minimalist, brutalist, and in black and white. The album, published in 2007 and tagged by DFA (a New York label specializing in dance-punk, electronic, and disco), opens with a hypnotic bass line; two notes repeated for more than half a minute paving the way for a drum with a martial rhythm and a guitar drawing the oblique melodies of Black Bunker, the forerunner of the namesake debut album from the English duo (live trio).

In total, 16 pieces alternate (almost all under three minutes) designing skeletal metropolitan frames of today's living, in the form of black and white photographs. The songs, like photos. The sights captured are abandoned industrial areas, desolate shopping centers, public toilets, houses with peeled plaster. Soulless places where figures of everyday life like the butcher and the baker from do you know your butcher, or the alienated worker from You are the worker, switch places and perform robotic daily gestures from Eat, sleep, and on the horizon, threateningly approach, the archetypical eighties figures of a bygone videogame era: you are the space invaders and Spaceman in your garden.