Liminal times be liminal. If there’s one thing that typifies the period i’m focusing on in this Lent Series, 1977–81, it’s the extent to which, with the proliferation of electronics, more than usually strange and wonderful things suddenly seemed to be possible. As i’ve explored previously, this led to some magnificently bold collisions of old tropes smashing against new ideas, as well as a tabula rasa mindset that sought to reconceive things entirely from scratch. In such a destabilized context as this, it led to some fundamental reimaginings of those old tropes that are as ear-boggling today as they must have been at the time. Stranger and more marvellous than most is Der Plan‘s 1980 debut album Geri Reig.
A strong sense of just how radical an overhaul is about to take place comes in opening track ‘Adrenalin Lässt Das Blut Kochen’ [adrenaline makes the blood boil]. Like a song structure formed out of some kind of electrified substance, the music pulses and ripples, bass and beats merge into a rapid, continuous stream, garnished with small synth twiddles and loud crashes of noise. Vocals are somewhere, singing, speaking, whispering, all of these and neither, words and timbres, sounds and shapes. Post-song?
It’s an intense, ultra-focused opening gambit, but Der Plan pull the rug out just before it fades, abruptly introducing the sound of eating crisps, the first of several such non sequiturs throughout the album. That irreverent playfulness is answered in ‘Geri Regi’ where, over mundane beats we hear the unlikely combination of a sped-up munchkin voice with vocoded backing vocals. It’s extremely odd after the opening track, like pop from an alien or artificial world. Another unrelated closing aside, a loud descending tone, leaves us guessing about what might come next. ‘Persisches Cowboy-Golf’ [Persian cowboy golf] seems to be something else from the alien world, a short, volatile, electronic soundscape, vaguely dramatic despite sounding sketch-like. From one perspective they seem wildly inconsistent, but all three tracks feel decidedly ‘other’, as if made of exotic sonic matter, shaped by an equally exotic musical mind.
What Der Plan have done in this opening music is fundamentally destabilise the assumptions we have. Notions of song, structure, meaning, tempo, melody, bass, beats, and the way instruments are deployed to articulate these ends, are all undermined, questioned, reconfigured, toyed with. ‘Gefährliche Clowns’ [dangerous clowns] confirms this by returning to the more pop-adjacent world of the opening track, but now the tempo chugs, the bass – again also serving the latent function of beats – a mere progression of blips, with only the vaguest of pitch shapes as counterpoint to the vocals, which exist in a hinterland beyond speech or song. Assorted electronic bleeps come and go, arbitrary embellishments, and as before there’s the sense that no sound, pitch or word is stable or well-defined, even the downbeat isn’t always clear.
We’re in a sonic space that’s surreal, fragmentary, dream-like. And the wild alternations continue. ‘Kleine Grabesstille’ [dead silence], another miniature window into a landscape made up of lopsided synth calls over austere chords, leading into ‘Der Weltaufstandsplan’ [the world uprising plan], where a basic beat and wobbly bass form the tenuous foundation for a child-like melody; synths sting, harmonies oscillate between tritones, everything on a tilt. It’s exacerbated in ‘Hans und Gabi’ where, despite being more assertive, the vocals are not so much reinforced as caked in a splurging mess with each and every phrase. The beats and bass abnegate responsibility to underpin or drive anything; they meander and squelch respectively, essentially indifferent, only stepping up at the mid-point to provide enough oomph for the lyrics to speak clearly. But the song sags back, and in due course the vocals are practically vandolised, clouded in a buzzy, overamplified fug – their assertion rendered null – which, by now, makes the various layers of the song seem almost independent, going it alone in parallel.
As if to prove (or un-prove) a point, ‘Commerce Extérieur Mondial Sentimental’ [global foreign trade sentiment] is rooted in a fast, post-Moroder bassline with impossible-to-discern vocal elements. Assorted sounds, tunes and noise come and go apropos of nothing, the whole sounding almost like a kind of ‘kosmische pop’ except its intensity is subversively meaningless, its strong sense of motion travelling in circles (the closing non sequitur, a burst of laughter, says it all). Sonically truer to Der Plan’s wilful overthrow of tropes is ‘San José Car Muzak’, perhaps the album’s brightest highlight. The beats seem regular but they hobble, and literally everything else above them is unstable: the bass wavers, pitches slide erratically, bursts of noise rain down. Partway through, the beats dissolve and electronics start to burble, perhaps trying to decode and solve the problem. It becomes an avant-middle 8, a deliciously queasy sequence where melody and bass undulate sickly, as if the track itself were poised to throw up. Nothing is resolved, the imbalance is restored, and while the music purports to dance, it’s a parodic paroxysm of lopsided movement, gloriously askew.
This central section of the album feels like it’s upping the ante. ‘Was Ich Von Mir Denke’ [what I think of myself] inhabits a hazy harmonic stasis, pummelled by practically eroded beat patterns, bruised by distorted buzz. Everything seems narrow, compressed (in every sense), hemmed into a tightly compacted space, which only makes the relaxed accompanying singsong vocals and whistles seem more incongruous. We’re beyond dreams; perhaps not in nightmares, but certainly a febrile, fantastical unreality. As such, the next miniature, ‘Erste Begegnung mit dem Tod’ [first encounter with death], doesn’t so much take a turn as plunge headlong into chaotic density, alive with electronic juddering and refracted words. ‘Ich Bin Schizophren’ [I am schizophrenic] is contrastingly clearer but ominously so, its remote rhythms, attenuated vocals and squelchy synths all locked into a weird, slow, cycling.
‘Nessie’ unexpectedly speaks as a throwback of sorts to the strong power and drive of opening track ‘Adrenalin Lässt Das Blut Kochen’. Yet here it’s irrevocably transformed, diminished, decimated. Bass with entirely spurious pitch; vocals reduced to gasping breaths, literally aspirational; electronics emitting an arbitrary stream of bleeps and stray blips; the opaque hardness of percussion turned into sporadic splashes of translucent liquid. Motion turns inward, spiralling. Thus the collapse: ‘Gefährliche Clowns (Manisch Idiotisch)’ [dangerous clowns (manic-idiotic)], where a strange, regular, plunky pulse plays out blankly, relentlessly. Vague vocal shapes, words, melodies, whispers, free-form over it, the pulse periodically reinforced by harsh noise accents, cracking an abstract whip. Not momentum, but the numb trudge of a death march, ad infinitum; not song but the crazed ravings of an unhinged mind, ad nauseam. Finally, definitely, post-song. As such, the coda ‘Die Welt Ist Schlecht’ [the world is bad] makes complete (un)sense: a bizarre, upbeat tune, more sped-up vocals and blurry half-speech, chugging and stomping into the innermost realms of nowhere.
When i explored Thomas Leer and Robert Rental’s album The Bridge, i described it as transitional, a semi-literal enactment of its title, carrying us from a place of recognisable connection across to somewhere new and experimental. By contrast, the trajectory of Geri Reig is very much more liminal, already beginning in a place of significant instability, which only becomes more radically inclined as it progresses. Not narrative but collapse; not process but sabotage. Der Plan wilfully, and skilfully, take nothing for granted: every sonic identity is up for grabs, a shape to be shifted, subverted, recalibrated, redefined, redeployed. Geri Reig is one of the most profound illustrations of the volatility playing out – and ‘playing’ is entirely the right word – at this critical point at the turn of the ’80s, where assumptions aren’t simply challenged but ruptured, in the most stunning, unforgettable ways.
Originally released in 1980, Geri Reig has been subsequently remastered and reissued on CD, vinyl and download, including six bonus tracks.
