FUNKSTÖRUNG: Appendix (!K7)

FUNKSTÖRUNG
Appendix
!K7210CD
!K7 Records 2007
11 Tracks. 52mins02secs



Buy it: CD
Funkstörung | !K7 Records

It is quite astonishing to realise that, in the ten or so years they worked together, Funkstörung only released three albums proper. Beside their own releases, the duo, formed of Michael Fakesch and Chris De Luca ran their own imprint, Music Aus Strom, for a while, produced a handful of records for other artists, worked on solo projects and remixed an incredible amount of tracks for people as diverse as Björk, Wu-Tang Clan, A Guy Called Gerald, Nils Petter Molvær or The Notwist, some of which have been collected in Additional Production (1999), Vice Versa (2001) and this latest offering.

While their sound placed the band in the direct vicinity of Autechre for a while, Fakesch and De Luca drifted toward more accessible terrains with their 2004 album Disconnected, before returning to their acid roots with the rather excellent vinyl-only Return To The Acid Planet offering two years ago, proving if necessary that they were most likely to be found where not expected.

Having gone their separate ways mid-last year, De Luca and Fakesch assembled this ultimate compendium of remixes as a bowing out act. Appendix is neither a retrospective of the band’s work, its scope being mostly centered around electro-funk and gritty electronica formations, with only rare occurrences of the surgical digital hip-hop that made their first album a rather interesting offering, nor a testament, but, as the vast majority of these remixes were done between 1999 and 2005, it provides an insight into the genesis of Disconnected and how their music had come to adapt so well to vocal performances.

Very much like Vice Versa, Appendix is an incredibly eclectic collection, which stretches well beyond the realm of their original heavy electronic assemblages, yet this still transpires to be the unifying thread between all the reworked tracks displayed here, from the stuttering hip-hop of Towa Tei’s Latte & Macaron or the liquid revision of Lusine ICL’s Sustain to the surprisingly quirky and radio friendly reshuffle of the Raveonettes’s Love In A Trashcan or the Breeders-esque remix of Enik’s No Fire. At times, this constant genre fidgeting can prove a tad tiring, but, when it works well, it is also a credit to the pair’s incredible aptitude to adapt to various situations.

All throughout their career, Funkstörung have fed their remixing experiments into their own work, which has in turn filtered down to further remixes. Thanks to this symbiotic approach, the band have followed unpredictable paths, sometimes to the detriment of credibility, yet, this constant recycling process has allowed them to thrive and challenge not only their audience, but themselves as artists.