DRNTTCKS shares a preference with other experimental German music projects for improvised soundscapes, hybrid aesthetics and reflection on themes such as esotericism, social criticism and the tension between seriousness and irony. And, if you like, a provinciality that is almost 'conscious': music not being the center of life and creative small business as a precarious tool for survival, but music as part of life, a resolute alternative to the escape into the artists' ghettos of the media cities. These introspective qualities are combined on DIE REPUBLIK VON ESO, their first real studio album, with the ability to translate global themes into intimate, surreal soundscapes.

Like the other bands from this non-scene which cares little for publicity and marketing cycles, DRNTTCKS interweave complex themes with an aesthetic that is as disturbing as it is beguiling. DIE REPUBLIK VON ESO critically explores personal experiences of crisis, political alienation, the influence of new age mindsets and the connection of self-optimization ideologies with neoliberalism and fascism. This is also reflected in the cover artwork by Würzburg artist Laila Quist - political black magic between tin foil hats and Donald Trump, a bourgeois ball game in a surreal private thicket, Scholz and Merz as cute little circus animals.
 

Released as a bonus album to DIE REPUBLIK VON ESO, PUNKERNIETEN combines both new improvisations as well as brandnew previously unreleased songs.

DUNKELFELDER is another entry in our ongoing series of directly recorded live jams – after tapes on Bulgaria's Beach Buddies, Austrian Feathered Coyote, german noise institution Grisaille and Britain's Industrial Coast, we return to their home turf Otomatik Muziek for the label’s last release.

As all other entries in this series, DUNKELFELDER was improvised on the spot and recorded in one take. It's a very much loop-based duo improvisation around cassette voices, flittering tape-echoing guitar and very minimal synth structures. An interplay with very few ingedrients, always reassembling themselves into new amorphous forms - part ambiguity, part uncertainty, DRNTTCKS hit the sweet dark spot that gets lost in translation otherwise - circling around the blank spaces of things hard to communicate.

When assembling the session, news were that german nazi party AFD won yet another regional election, and tbh, things are getting more & more sinister around here. Maybe there is a cause & effect at work with more and more underground joints closing down and that far-right wind blowing through the empty streets. Places of disobedience, they disappear. So DUNKELFELDER is an attempt to manifest such a place. It will never be a soundtrack to activism, but always a noise in opposition, clearly antifascist, queered up working class drone. DRNTTCKS will never do a call to arms, but if they did, this might be as close as it can get. DUNKELFELDER is a direct look into the Deutsche Seele, into dark times (Dunkelzeit) and dark digits (Dunkelziffer). Fuck you, Dunkeldeutschland.
 

As a part of our ongoing series of directly recorded live jams, we are proud to release ERST DIE ARBEIT, DANN DAS VERGNÜGEN on Bucharest's Beach Buddies Records which has been recently featured in The Wire Magazine. The tape includes eight tracks which have been improvised with ritual regularity and baptized in the name of German highway parking lots. Mastering has been done by Maurice Schirm.
 

We are proud that Austria's psychedelica & experimental powerhouse FEATHERED COYOTE RECORDS releases our tape OKBOOMER! which offers up six new compositions / soundscapes that continue an often rather melodic, always engaging and decidedly anti-fascist take on the drone/noise genre. Improvised in one lush, fourth world mode live session testing out some weird woodwind besides the staple food from synth and guitar noise. Featuring beautiful watercolour cover art and layout by Charlotte Weyh.
 

After WHITE GAZE, our latest release MAMA WAS A WHITE BIRCH, DADDY WAS A GERMAN OAK is the second venture on a label outside the Otomatik Muziek cosmos, this time on Julius Ménard's excellent experimental imprint Grisaille Records and we are more than honoured to become a part of their catalogue. MAMA WAS A WHITE BIRCH, DADDY WAS A GERMAN OAK was recorded live with no overdubs as a live session shortly before the pandemic hit the fan, end of 2019. Like a mycellium, sounds and ideas overlap, slowly evolve and grow into small entities. Listen carefully to the Klapperschwamm and the Herkuleskeule exclusively played on this release which serves as a reminder that strong networks will endure despite all the shit going on in the world.
 

What is no+no? Is it a definitive no to the madness and decay of democracy surrounding us? Is it a negative yes to another reality? Is it an affirmation of a change to come? Somewhere between feedback loops, pitched down vocals, distorted dub, cosmic synths, primitive beats and drone guitars there might be an answer.

On their 6th release, DRNTTCKS for the first time deviated from their usual practice of recording all sessions directly and just editing around edges. During the lockdowns they found themselves in a situation wholly different to their improv approach - alone in the rehearsal room, they listened to what the other has recorded. All based on lose structures that were conceived during the last row of live shows before the shit hit the fan, these songs took shape brick by brick/take by take, resulting in a much more straight forward, defined sound which received an additional heavyweight fidelity treatment from OLO Mastering Berlin.

The freeform noise surfaces of past releases fade into the background in favor of slowed-down proto-techno beats and repetitive bass lines, catching the harsh, immersive vibe of DRNTTCKS' pre-pandemic live concerts, and function as the sonic equivalent of the quagmire of chaos we reside in.

Or as a review for NEIN + NEIN put it:

"Holy psychedelic John Carpenter, Batman! What just hit us? As you can tell by the cover, DRNTTCKS have served us an album of dystopian party music. The ghosts of techno watch a glowing sunrise emerging from the ruins of the city.

Yet perhaps it's a more personal apocalypse? There's a sort of industrial solipsism at play here. A techno melancholy. The hypnotic melodics cast a dark shadow to me.

Sort of like Front 242 on ketamine or like crying on a rave. A beautifully distressing album to get lost in."
 

DRNTTCKS return with their fifth full-length release, this time on british tape label Industrial Coast. WHITE GAZE takes a grim look at Europe anno 2019: ongoing wars against migration through the EU government and Frontex, the rise of racist nationalist parties all over the continent, a re-installment of identity politics and re-legitimation toxic masculinity. Things are fucked, but maybe they are as fucked now as they were in 1910 or 1986, because the regime has been mostly the same. It’s the panoptic stare of white, wealthy and more than often male, heterosexual cis bodies. Who still set the rules. Who still distribute the power.

All graphic work on this release is done by artist Elisabeth Thoma. The photos used for WHITE GAZE were taken in the ethnographic departement of a natural history museum. There were no white bodies objectified or exhibited.
 

Recorded within the last 3 years, these improv jams were never intended to be released as an album, but, as it often happens within improvisation, sometimes things just click.

While being locked away in a wooden hut in the middle of nowhere, northeast France, with nothing but rain pouring down outside, Franz Joseph, one half of DRNTTCKS, gave some old jams a deep re-listening while doing rough mixes of some more recent recordings, and suddenly, it all was there. Titles popping up, different recordings floating into one another, all held together by one sentence, truism, lie: ES IST ALLES SO SCHÖN - it is all so beautiful.

Here we have a culmination of live recordings with just two mics hanging around in the room, more carefully structured songs like "Totalstaat (In Dub)", some short skits of noise, sitting right beneath the eruptive doom freakout of "Proteinkreuz", or a more minimalistic, feedback-driven version of the DRNTTCKS sound spectrum like "Memoryschaum".

See this one as a kind of mixtape. Or a document of life on earth, 2017, distilled through the machines of the Drone Attacks.Endure Freeform.
 

The outcome of these recordings, made between 2013 and 2014, is lurching between sparse experiments with contact mics and arythmic drum loops, new age synth references played on guitars, frail melodies and no-input noise. No rock approach. Autonomous, autistic at best.

MITTEN refers to the recorded sound, consisting mostly of two deranged guitars, alienated through a jungle of effects, swinging somewhere between a frequency of 400 and 1000 Hz. It also refers in terms of sociology to an alienated middle class; weary heart and dead soul of society. Sound built upon suburban homes with front gardens, half-life behind curtains, esoteric amplification of the self, improvement of the self, hypertrophy of the self, a loss of political attitude and ideals of humanism in favour of individualism, homestead and smoothies.

This theme also finds its equivalent in Dicey Studios‘ artwork: red and green, the colours of the two compatible political left-winged parties, as the factual liaison between „Deutschtum“ and the remains of the krautrock movement. From suburban lawns to weed-infested rehearsal rooms in youth centers. From the Bundestag to batik slips, from military interventions to the neurotic details of waste separation.

All tracks have been mixed down in 2016 from live improvisations recorded as duo at DRNTTCKS headquarter in 2013/14. Sources: voice, guitars, no-input mixing desks analogue and digital effect pedals.
 

Live recording of an early DRNTTCKS performance at Neues Museum, Nuremberg, self released on a CD-R with screen-printed sleeve. The theme of these noise explorations is both mirrored in the recording's title DIS|PLAY which points to the deconstructionistic approach in DRNTTCKS' early phase as well as in the album cover art showing Penrose tiles which will never create any periodic patterns.
 

Earliest signs of DRNTTCKS, self released in 2012 on a double mini CD-R. Seven noise explorations presevered from a time the Bavarian state broadcasting called during an infamous live gig at Nuremberg's Radio Z to check if this is still music or a faulty transmission.
 

FREIFORM ERTRAGEN
2024 / XDR / Tape Compilation / VERYDEEPRECORDS #60

CASPAR MELCHIOR BAPHOMET
2023 / SW001  / Digital Compilation / Signal Weltfunk

прекратить войну
2022 / FOR THE LACK OF BETTER WORDS - A Compilation In Solidarity With The People Of Ukraine / Digital Album / Otomatik Muziek

EXISTENZ IST EIN TRAUM DEN MAN NICHT ZU SEHR BELEUCHTEN DARF
2022 / BLURRED / Tape Compilation / Grisaille Records #50

RAT-À-TÊTE
2016 / FFFF / Tape Compilation / Magnetic Purely #6

LICHTSCHACHT
2014 / SHOOBIE GO HOME! / Digital Album / doubledotdash!?

MASS GAINER
2014 / WE WRECKED THIS CITY / Tape Compilation / Magnetic Purely #2