I first stumbled upon Nitzer Ebb when they released their ”Belief” album in1988/89. “Nitzer Ebb” pronounced “NITE-zer Ebb” is a completely made up word that fit the nature of the music.
I was blown away. To this day the epitomy of everything I love about electronic music is encompassed in this album. It is definately in my “Desert Island” list of CD’s along with 1990’s follow up “Showtime”. It is still a phenomenal recording that stands up to today’s standards of EBM bliss. Keep in mind the context of synth music in the late 1980’s & early nineties. Most of the music from that era was very formulaic and contained very “date-stamped” synth sounds with the atypical pretty-boy I-want-to-sound-like-Dave-Gahan vocal style. (Date stamping is the use of factory synth patches that were popular in digital synthesizers that make a song sound dated.) Belief reveled in minimalistic deep analog pulsing synths with the dynamic and larger than life vocals of Douglas McCarthy. Dark, menacing and bordering on erotic undertones, Belief is an electronic masterpiece. Cited as “International Funk Aggression” the music was heavily influenced by Russian Constructivist art, Futurism, and totalitarian imagery. Many of us ebbheads have craving more from this before-their-time band. Rumor has that the recent Nitzer Ebb re-union tours has the Nitzer’s back in the studio working on new material. It’s like the second coming for me!
In the meantime, Nitzer vocalist Douglas McCarthy returned from nearly a 10 year musical hiatus and joined forces with Terence Fixmer. Fixmer is an innovative french techno artist who relies on analog sequencing and has strong EBM leanings. A couple of years ago they released their CD “Between The Devil”, it is a great album that recieves a great amount of attention on my ipod. If you’re a Nitzer fan, this CD is a necessary purchase/download.
The tracks are mixed seamlessly together and it feels more of an entire piece of work of seperate movements than a traditional collection of 13 seperate songs. The songs have a freeform quality about them that I love, not the traditional verse-chorus formula of pop music. It’s dark and spooky and sounds really good played loud while driving down the I-5 before dawn on in misty Seattle. I find myself arriving at this disc alot for musical inspriation as of late. And it’s hopefully a nice preface to some new Ebb.
