Mai 12 — Wir Sind Die Terroristen, Gegen Die Touristen
The 3inc CDR’s are stamped with black texts- and these come in a small white cardboard box, which feature stuck on black & white label featuring grainy shape collages. There’s also a tracing paper inlay featuring black texts, taking in the track listings when it was recorded & various release related web links. The release appeared in a numbered edition of forty-two copies- and as of writing the label still, have copies left.
Mai 12 is a project from Thessaloniki, Greece- it started in October 2017, and is made up of the duo of Karl Grümpe & Rene p.g. According to Discogs the project has put out around twenty releases thus far- taking in mainly digital released titles. I’m not sure if these were all wall base, but this release certainly is.
Wir Sind Die Terroristen, Gegen Die Touristen (We are the terrorists, against the tourists) takes in four walls- one on each of the CDR, each track comes in just under or just under the twenty-minute mark. So first up we have "I"- here we get a mixture of grimy, grim & blunt low-end drone, slightly rattle bound-yet- crisp jittering, and a circular static grain pop & snap. The low-end gives the whole thing a very cavernous/underground feel, while the additional layers creating a fairy busy-if- at times messy sense of rapidly crumbling descent. It’s certainly a very dense & fairly uninformed in structure example of wall-craft, I do like the hazed & earthy low-end- through the other textures do tend to become somewhat tiresome after the halfway point.
"II" feels fairly similar to "I", but it finds the low-end becoming a lot more rumble & almost blunt percussion like in its constant fixed churn. The topping layers here are a mixture of rattling & jitter, cascading & crisp feasting, and distant hacks & snaps. The vibe here felt bleakly droning in an almost ambient industrial manner- and I’m afraid this track did even less than the first one for me, as the textures utilized where not really in any way appealing or creative.
"III" is not really any great departure from the first two tracks, though there were a few more interesting elements at play. Once again we get a muffled drone like rumble, which this time sounds like the distant roar of a road- on top of this, we get a selection of smaller & interlocking rattle, snap & pop based textures. In these topping elements, you can clearly make out these pleasing flirting & micro breaking tones- which brought to mind trying to flight your way through thick forest undergrowth- with the drone nicely adding to the tunnelling vibe of the film .
Lastly of course "IV"- and sadly after the more appealing elements of the last track, things really once again move back to the somewhat bland & uninspired. We get a slightly morphed earthy drone, which is covered by a flitting selection of scrapes, shakes, judders, and pops. Gone are the more interesting elements of "III", and back are the rather bland & uncreative textural blends of the second track.
You can certainly see reason/ logic for tracks on a release having a similar mix of textures- but the problem here is they are mostly too similar, and when I first played this release thorough I wondered if some sort of error had occurred & the same track was here four times- after playing it through a few more times it’s clear there are very subtle different selections of textures on all four tracks.
It’s always nice to hear & see new wall acts coming into the scene, but I’m afraid to say that too much of Wir Sind Die Terroristen, Gegen Die Touristen feels badly repetitive, bland & not very inspired- yes you can make wall-noise like this, and of course it’s monolithic & crushing in its attack- the problem is it’s also boring & more than a little dull.