- With a serrated blend of techno, post-punk and gabber, Victoria Vassiliki Daldas and Theo Zeitner are on a mission to make everyone a little scared and excited at the same time.
- Victoria Vassiliki Daldas and Theo Zeitner couldn't have known what they were starting when they met in Neukölln on a Tinder date. Both had been dabbling in music for years, without a clear focus or path forward, and they were ravenous music fans, running through the tastes they shared before zeroing in on D.A.F., the renowned German Neue Deutsche Welle band who would lay the blueprint for the Brutalismus 3000 sound: caustic, irreverent, fast and quintessentially European. Carefully working on their project through the pandemic, Brutalismus 3000 emerged fully formed from its lockdown cocoon, taking clubland by storm and raising rarely seen levels of hype in the dance music world. ULTRAKUNST is their fierce and self-assured debut album, an alternately frightening and snotty blast of curdled rage and humour that sounds like a really good party gone off the rails.
The Berlin duo call their music "nu-gabber-post-techno-punk," but really, it's bloghouse to me. The music has a punk snarl, though it's rooted in genres like trance and electroclash, with a heavy coating of distortion on the vocals and kick drums that land like a stiletto heel to the chest. The early '00s influence is particularly strong on tracks like "GR3Y," where the vocal affect—slithering through vowel sounds before landing with a consonant thud at the end of each line—is a dead ringer for early Crystal Castles or HEALTH, with the same uneasy appeal that made those bands crossover successes 15 years ago.
But, crucially, Ultrakunst is more than just fashionable (or unfashionable) genre references and hip posturing. The duo are proudly anti-techno, decrying the scene while gleefully making fun of it: "Going to Berghain is not a revolution," they once said, before admitting that they will always go there "forever."
Like their American spiritual cousins 100 gecs, this in-betweenness means that their music can veer from silly to incisive in mere seconds. Take "Safe Space," a track which features wild screaming ridiculing the very concept of a safe space itself, with Daldas practically spitting out the words "I always keep a knife on me" in German. The deceptively upbeat "Pontiac Parrissiene" is a hair-raising tale of murder in suburbia, made all the more creepy with its chipmunk vocals and Eurodance piano.
Daldas sings in a trilingual mix of English, Slovakian and German, which makes the music feel cosmopolitan and edgy. You don't need a lyric sheet or Google Translate to understand the music—especially lyrics like "Gimme ket / Gimme ket" on "Suka Suka"—but it adds a certain depth, and exposes contradiction at the heart of the duo's appeal. Brutalismus 3000 represent a generation that skewers the electronic music scene but finds salvation in it at the same time. They embrace its social aspects and its paradoxes, along with the mindless self-destruction of it all. The duo make a play at violence but couch it in exaggerated forms of dance music, switching between languages like a drunk tourist in Panorama Bar trying to form coherent sentences.
As Brutalismus 3000 would likely say themselves, this music is not revolutionary. It's not even particularly original. But it's their personalities that sell it, their sheer willingness to try anything—screaming a Lil Uzi Vert chorus over '00s-style electro house on "Je N'existe Pas?" Why not?—and to switch from one extreme to the other—skippy house on the wonderfully titled "Die Liebe Kommt Nicht Aus Berlin" ("Love Doesn't Come From Berlin") followed by urgent techno on "Nur Mein Körper Und Die Angst"—that makes their music feel uniquely unhinged.
"The techno scene is so unstylish," they said in that same interview. That's their mission statement, or at least their jumping-off point. With their oh-so-German influences and Sven Marquardt photoshoots, Brutalismus 3000 participate in what they're trying to tear down from the inside. They want to make it more fun and down to earth for everyone, even if they have to crack a few skulls to get there. Sometimes it sounds a bit dangerous, but it's all in good fun.
Tracklist01. ALL DIE LIEBEN MENSCHEN
02. GR3Y
03. CRY B3B3
04. SAFE SPACE
05. PONTIAC PARISIENNE (SKIT)
06. JE N'EXISTE PAS
07. DIE LIEBE KOMMT NICHT AUS BERLIN
08. NUR MEIN KÖRPER UND DIE ANGST
09. IS U CHEMICAL
10. SUKA SUKA
11. GEWALT GEWALT