Chris Imler

“Imler caused a stir, hypnotically moving his hands and hips in a salacious and undulating dance.” (The Moscow Times) The kinetic magic of his wicket playing style makes him the voodoo priest of Berlin’s music scene. He was a member of the legendary “Golden Showers” and has also played and plays with “Soffy O”, “Peaches”, “Electronicat”, “Puppetmastaz”, “Oum Shatt“, „Die Türen“ and many others, more recently he has been collaborating with Two Monkeys. In 2012 a 7Inch, his solo debut, came out on the belgium label “Meeuw”. It features the exhilerating and disturbing song “Vorwärts”, textwise a mixture of gloomy si-firomanticism and socialist hymn. He released the albums “Lemniscate” 2011 (a soundinstallation, developed during a residency at the Robert Wilson Institute in NY), “We are The World” 2013 as “Driver&Driver” with Patric Catani and his solo-albums “Nervös” 2014 and „Maschinen und Tiere“ 2018 on the labels “Sonig” and “Staatsakt“. Delay-alienated vocals and jarring drums, accompanied by booming basses and hypnotic loops is the sound of „the master of the good bad-mood-tune“ (Verbrecher Verlag), eternally touring through Europe. It simply can be said, that Imler „preserves fire rather than worship ashes” (G.Mahler). He says YES to a cheerful imposition and to an anarchic variety of austerity, NO to premature customer service and petrified resistance formulas. He knows time is a moving target, and whoever wants to beat it to death must adjust their weapons. At large his lyrics describe the stones that late capitalism lays in your way “I lost my bag on the way to Vienna/I wanted to save myself from ruin (…) I deserve never to get what I deserve /Do I deserve the war I get /Did I deserve to derail with all my trains” he sings in “Fahrvergnügen”, and the cheerful pessimistic “Nach Unten” (downwards) leaves no doubt about the final destination of the journey: “It goes down / It goes down / To the dogs tied up in front of the customer centre” (translated from German). But also the journey into the abyss can be an adventure, and a better instruction guide is really hard to wish for.c