Mono für alle! - San Pedro Konzert (2003) (10/10)

MONO FÜR ALLE! is a musical phenomenon coming from the small city of Giessen in Germany. The band plays an absolutely unique mixture of Electronic Punk, discordant Ambient and Krautrock. These genres are only mentioned to give you a slight idea of what to expect from this band as they aren’t comparable to anything I know and the band itself refuses to be put into any categories. The band is first of all composed of Mono who performs some androgynous high pitched vocals that sound sometimes childish and innocent, sometimes overtly aggressive and hysterical. He also plays an electric organ that sounds quite discordant and gives the band a very unusual trademark sound. During their shows, Mono often sets its big organ on fire and works with a very unique and simplistic microphone that is fixed around his neck. In a couple of songs, he also plays guitar or harmonica. The second musician is Yenzzo who performs the bass guitar and varies its style from very slow and minimalist rhythms to quite fast and mostly improvised passages. It’s somewhat the same thing for the third and last musician who is called Kick and who performs the drums in a way that varies from laid back loops up to blistering high speed passages. When the band started under the banner THE HATJOKERS twenty-five years ago, a guitar player was in the band but when he left the band decided to not replace him. As far as I am concerned, MONO FÜR ALLE! remains the only real Rock band I know that has no guitar player.

The most important thing about this alternative and controversial band is though the lyrics. The band writes about things happening in society that inspire them. They often take the place of an individual being facing extreme situations or representing radical points of view and write the lyrics from this point of view. Nothing is sacred for this band: some tracks criticize McDonald’s, other ones talk about 9/11 in the most cynical way, and others defend the position of somebody who wants to abolish the German protection of the Constitution and shoot the forces of the state. The lyrics created so many scandals and the band members were even put under surveillance by the German secret service to check if they wouldn’t build up a militia to bring the government or contemporary social order to fall. Some people tried to censor or even ban their tracks from radio and wanted their lyrics to disappear from the band’s official website. Several lawsuits occurred but the band later said that they were declared innocent and acquitted from possible charges as their works are recognized as pieces of art.

The band is also well known for its spontaneous projects and this release we have here is definitely the most outstanding one. The band organized a road trip to Spain ten years ago and offered the chance to some fans and friends to join them on their trip for only eighty-nine Euros. MONO FÜR ALLE! decided to play in an isolated hippie community called San Pedro in Southern Spain that is situated next to a beach. They didn’t announce their project to the local community though and the strange people were quite surprised when the band suddenly arrived with its equipment in a small boat and when they saw a couple of fans that had marched across sandy hills for several hours to get to the location. The band started its concert and had to face a quite special audience. Some hippies adored the show but some others found the music too aggressive and wanted to call the police. During the concert, a guy entered the stage to perform a strange dance and accidentally injured some band members. At another moment, one guy just pulled the plug and cut off electricity. Other funny moments include a barking dog that felt quite deranged by the strange music and some drunken hippies yelling nonsense in the microphone. Most of this can be seen or heard on the two discs. The band played for several hours and performed its set several times. They only stopped due to some issues with the vocals and a couple of hostile reactions from the crowd. While the band left the next day and headed back for Germany, some of their fans decided to stay with the hippie community. This strange project was later released as audio disc and SVCD (a DVD would have been far too commercial for this kind of band) including a lot of documentary footage. The release comes in a wooden box without any sticker, any booklet or any lyrics whatsoever and only features the two discs and a band photo.

Let’s get into the music now. The band opens its quite unusual concert with the track “Langweiliges Leben” (“Boring Life”) that tells in a quite short and pessimist way the life of an ordinary guy who looks back on what he has gone through: severe education, ordinary job, heartless family, getting older, feeling lonely and preparing for death. This song definitely makes you feel like getting out of this kind of way of life in order to do something more exciting than the masses tend to do. The second track is entitled “Hier gefällt’s mir nicht” (“I Don’t Like It Here”) where a guy talks about getting out with his wife on weekend despite hating it. He goes out in the discotheques to listen to awful music, to get observed and judged by drunken people and to please to his wife. He describes the whole situation as horrible and expresses his need to get out of all of this to discover something new. The third track “Amoklauf” (“Rampage”) is one of the most famous and controversial tracks of the band due to some internet popularity. A young man talks about leaving his house with a weapon one morning to go to a central place where he shoots old people, sick people and even young mothers with kids before fleeing from the police and the secret service after having killed a psychologist and a guy from a S.W.A.T. team. In the end, he asks himself how all of this arrived and as he doesn’t find an answer the narrator commits suicide. The fourth song “Alles falsche Schweine” (“All wrong pigs”) talks about a guy who observes people doing the opposite of what they pretend and who gets quite angry about this. The fifth track “Vision der Unsterblichkeit” (“Vision Of Immortality”) is a story about a completely insane guy who wants to freeze himself to wake up several centuries later in order to remain immortal. The last song “Terrorkatastrophe” (“Terror Disaster”) is a quite weird instrumental that features no lyrics and closes this weird concert.

In the end, all these words are not enough to describe this band. They are definitely different from anything you might know. Some people adore and understand the concept; others just despise the discordant music and don’t get the sense of the controversial lyrics. You really need to think while you listen to this kind of music. This live record is one of the rare physically available releases by the band and features the portrait of a highly experimental band in a quite strange place. The best thing is that the concert movie features German and also English subtitles so that you can at least understand the lyrics because this is what the band is all about.

For further information, you can head easily find listening examples on the internet or take a look on the site about this concert with press reactions, photos and even an experience report by one of the fans who decided to stay in San Pedro: http://www.sanpedrokonzert.de.vu/

(Online October 15, 2012)