Music Gödz, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 23rd December 2004

Musik Gödz – Berlins finest technopoet – comes to the ICA for a one-night fusion of thrash-punk, techno, and beat poetry which addresses post-holocaust flummoxing through “nasal disbelief and apathetic shutdown”.

Gödz’s “Dancehall MusikMachina: The Machine of Gödz", inspired by a Smashing Pumpkins album, is a technobooth organ built by Gödz himself and requiring two "konductors". The first produces spinethrashing vibratibass using a combination of the venue’s floor and organic shapes which die in the process of the sonic output. The other controls the “arbeiten-pipen” (of which there are 16, one for every colour of the alphabet) to spew out verbs and nouns in tandem with the random projections launched into the eyes of the crowd. This culminates in Gödz literally throwing a spanner in the works, straining the MusikMachina’s components until revolutions reach speeds of what Gödz terms “mach frei”.

Gödz’s performances are highly controversial. He has not played a show in Germany for 4 years, after a series of incidents directly related to his renowned shows. In 1998, 3 crowd members were blinded after scenes of Jewish tea parties were xenon-blasted into their retinas. The same year saw an explosion at a Hamburg gig after Gödz failed to perform a safety check on his heavily customised and reputedly “mindlessly dangerous” equipment. No-one was hurt in the incident, although the venue has yet to reopen. Gödz was finally banned from performing in his homeland after a performance in a Berlin primary school left 6 children bleeding.

Tickets are available here.