Grotto Terrazza is the project of Thomas Schamann, a music maker and independent publisher from Munich who also plays in Berlin darkwave band Bleib Modern. The debut Grotto Terrazza tape Stumpfer Gegenstand (“Blunt Object”), released jointly by Vienna’s Cut Surface and London’s Maple Death, combines German beat poetry with icy post-punk and shadowy industrial, constructed from the found-sound building blocks of musique concrete and borrowing as much from folk noir murder ballads as it does EBM.
The album was conceived when Schamann visited Paris with Bleib Modern, and left his bandmates to wander solo through the neon-lit Pigalle area of the city. Cut Surface describe the time as “a semi-lucid walk through a summer evening encountering ghosts, violence, illusions and dreams steaming from the streets.” This surreal and ominous atmosphere seeps into the marrow of the songs on Stumpfer Gegenstand, like one of those one-night movies that sees its protagonist sucked into an increasingly strange and dangerous underworld.
The whole thing feels cold and dark and vaguely unreal, bathed in the gaudy glow of after-dark attractions. From the oddly intimate opening of ‘Waiting For Henry’ to the fuzzy slo-mo electro pop of ‘Green Tea Jameson’s Lemon’, every song seems set in a slightly nightmarish alternate reality that sits just behind our own. ‘Was Leben Will Muss Sterben’ (or, ‘What Longs to Live Must Die’) is one of the album’s most direct moments, a post-punk song that balances twitchy guitars and a driving drum beat against Schamann’s deadpan vocals. It’s catchy and energetic and impressively atmospheric, wrapped up in a late Cold War aesthetic of nihilism and concrete-grey brutalism.
The slow march of ‘Baptismal Piscine’ sees a creepy ominous tone rise into a near-transcendental certainty, not so much cutting through the dark but embracing it. ‘Furst Mitternacht’ rises from street sounds and crackling static, ragged beats heralding vocals that sound like they’re delivered over a PA system. As it advances, the song becomes increasingly woozy and strange, guitar and percussion glittering like chemically-induced hallucinations. Returning to more conventional post punk, ‘Gestalt Bondage’ feels like getting swept up in the dark currents of underground nightlife, secret clubs in hollowed-out basements and disused factories seething with all manner of noctural visitors.
Stumpfer Gegenstand ends on ‘Aus Dem Wald Kommt Eine Frau’, built from desolate negative space and strangely melodic keys and yawning feedback and little spherical blips that sound like a submarine’s sonar. The more conventional song elements (vocals, guitar, drums) appear in incongruous intermissions, coming out of nowhere as proof that Grotto Terrazza will remain unpredictable until the very end.
Stumpfer Gegenstand is out now via Cut Surface and Maple Death Records.
