Back to Munich, with another project from one of the guys behind Bleib Modern. Their own copy on Bandcamp does GROTTO TERRAZZA more justice than I’m going to be able to muster. Blunt Object… yes.

“Transforming from a blunt object into a smoldering saint, just another day thought on the never ending collage of life, a pattern that continuously evolves like Grotto Terrazza, the Munich based art/music/life project of Thomas Schamann.

‘Stumpfer Gegenstand’ (Blunt Object) is his musical debut for Cut Surface and Maple Death, a beautiful intimate album of translucent dark beat poetry, that flickers between rhythmical murder ballads, Neue Deutsche Welle, the early experiments of Palais Schaumburg and the industrial malaise of Cabaret Voltaire; this is art-punk that plays with musique concrete and finds it’s pop sensibility rooted in EBM and folk noir.

Schamann started collecting bits and pieces of this and that in order to use them for a cut-up of some sort in 2015. Slowly two distinct and cohesive pieces came to life, his editorial debut, “Trattoria Nihil”, a 250 page collection of beat poetry in German & drawings, and this album ‘Stumpfer Gegenstand’, started roughly in 2017 in Paris, France. Thomas was on tour with his other band, darkwave Berlin project Bleib Modern, with a few days off, and decided to split from his bandmates and embark on an odyssey through Pigalle and other parts of the city; this is where the seeds of the album were firmly planted.”

The connection to Bleib Modern may or may not be apparent in the music. At moments it is, but where BM is colder and more detached, Grotto Terrazza is dark and somehow more organic. It brings the fear. It brings some strange element of chemical nights in clubs and alleys. Call it darkwave. I’ll call it art-punk collage. There’s something vaguely pornographic about it. It’s dirty, in a way.

But my mind has always been in the gutter, or so people said in my childhood. It never seemed an insult, though the intent was there. What does that even mean? In the gutter? Okay. Let’s see what’s down here. People drop valuable things all the time and either don’t realize or are too fucking lazy to look for them. We’ll get by down here.

This was recorded in a period spanning 2017 and 2018. It would have been interesting to see how it might have evolved were it during the pandemic. Then again, I will still maintain that the pandemic didn’t change the world for the better or the worse so much as it exposed everything that was twisted and perverse. So maybe…

Not a lot to say at all today. I’m immersed in music and images. It’s a good place to be.

Floating.

Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. The next hour isn’t, really. May as well take advantage of feeling good.