Genre: Rhythmic industrial / Achtung Disko

01 Total Discipline
02 Achtung Disko
03 The Dance of the Pansies
04 Kinder Kinder
05 Spacial Awareness
06 Alcohol
07 Information Apocalypse
08 Nutcase
09 Stormy Night
10 Paranoia
11 We Steal Die Ananas
12 Recycled Life
13 Bonus Track (Good King W.)

I suggest to use the title of this CD in “Genres” line to describe this type of music, because honestly I hear such kind of martial samples usage for the first time. When we see the booklet with a german (you may put any other soldier on the place of german one however) soldier on it, first thought that comes to our mind sounds like “hum, I guess it is going to be something martial” and then depending on the surrounding artwork, our urge to find out the truth in the net or just our knowledge we know or risk to assume that it is going to be something ambient or something rhythmic an pompous, filled with pride and honour, either some military pop release. Well, here the title gives us a small hint, but what I heard when put this CD into the hi-fi made me a bit shocked.

Standgericht is the result of collaboration of a musician named Snowwy (focused on martial aesthetics in another project – SnowW.Wwhite) and Greg L. Achtung Disko is the first CD of Standgericht (apart from appearing on Electro Arc compilation vol. 1 with Broken Life track and on WHW Skullline compilation with the track Total Discipline V2, that’s present on Achtung Disko! too ) and is issued on Skullline Records, a German label that releases albums of such acts as Bleiburg, Kadaver, TT, Genocide Lolita, Kenji Siratori and many others.

As it is written in different sources, Standgericht’s music has much to do with rhythmic industrial. That’s true, it is industrial and indeed rhythmic. But what makes it different from other rhythmic industrial acts is that the sounds used are produced in most cases not with the help of software, for example, but rather cut from the samples of military marches (both musical composition and acts like soldiers marching), drum rolls (also cut from somewhere as well as reproduced on synths) and speeches, which makes it quite an interesting phenomena. Of course, those are dissolved a bit with synthetic patterns and samples (some of which are quite familiar to those who used software for music creation), however, these are not the vast majority (which is more than fine, because tracks created with the help of militant samples have a much more interesting and fresh sound). Track 10 is called Paranoia and the CD may indeed drive you crazy, because as it occured it has a hypnotizing effect.

This CD doesn’t seem to have some sophisticated philosophical ideas, lying behind each track and behind the album in general (how can one be serious with the track names as “We Steal Die Ananas”, which, by the way, refers to 80s as it seems). As it is written on Standgericht’s myspace page “Standgericht is dedicated to make this world a noisier place” and that’s what this album is doing. People just enjoy doing what they do, they are fond of combining different elements and different genres they enjoy listening to in this one project, Standgericht. And eventually Achtung Disko turned out to be quite amusing, perky and provoking with its militant spirit, martial aesthetics, all those samples, melodies and various rhythms originating in EBM.