presse

	pt.2 "Jod" (track 2) starts with what you'd hear on a department store escalator, all disconnected shoppers,  misdressed mannequins, and other subliminal pom-pom action. This mutates at short notice into euro-wave apocalypticism (Killing Joke?) creating an Oxes tailwind. Would the video to this (have, ca. 1983) feature(d) video-of-TV-decay footage of El Salvador & Reagan (following the typical '80s "abolish the present by  onfiring the proxy" image politics)? No, because bagio are not a retro operation. Uwe's heavily-processed guitar may revive some leads, but with  an entirely negative component, too: an injunction to steer clear of those two dominant influences on the instrument that were never good ideas to begin with, namely Thurston Moore's jangle and  Kurt Kobain's Sabbath-meets-Beatles-isms. Like it or not, Bagio are part and parcel of this era of diminishing expectations (and, incidentally, the laptop '90s proved that "getting rid of the band" did not necessarily free up musical possiblilities, since it also meant subscribing to the technological rat-race). The CD's title track mixes a surreptitious phone-recording of an employee's "immediate dismissal" (fristlose Kündigung) with a sinister tom-tom crescendo. Perhaps their aseptcism is the counterpart of a certain bacterial reality which is less easy to mobilize against than Reagan (or Bush jr.). Clinical smoothness, or euphoria? In fine form here, bagio try to span both. (1) For those not versed in intrument arcana: drum-pad kits substitute conventional membrane drums by plastic disks equipped with sensors. The drummer hears a synthetic drum sound via headphone or amp. This allows apartment-dwellers to discretely practice, at home, at any hour of the day or night.
	<- part 1		the thing pt.2