2023-05-31 16:12:39
Es is a mantra, it’s taped for an hour: “You won’t get much for your money.” What you get at the club concert by Augn, a duo of two anonymous musicians, is a stage with two puppets, one holding the bass, the other the microphone, they wear stocking masks like Augn in the few pictures that exist of them. Sometimes the mantra is interrupted by the announcement: “Berlin sucks.”
whoever eye are, where they come from and, above all, what they want to say to whom with their raw outbursts of rage – they carefully chose the monarch in Kreuzberg for their first appearance in the capital. The club looks like a dark back room. He is in an apartment building at Kottbusser Tor, the “Kotti”, as the newcomers call their beloved focal point. And smoking again. When the music begins, the puppets and their audience stand in a fog. The 16 tracks from the previous complete work, Augn’s debut album, it’s called “You’ll see / Grauer Star” roll off the tape. Songs like “Berghain”, “Brandenburg Wolf” and “Lügen”.
And like “Father’s Day”, the first song of the album and of the evening: “You can hardly be a man again these days, everything is politicized right away!”, von Augn scolds with the microphone. In addition, the bass of the other bangs. The self-pity of the chanting escalates into screams: “What else is allowed!”
They shot an amateur video for each of their key pieces. In the Movie for “Father’s Day” they hide behind pig masks and let a climate activist pull them down a country road in the provinces in a small car. The license plate locates them in Görlitz, in the south-east of Saxony. However, Father’s Day is not celebrated there like in the West, but rather Lord’s Day.
The search for traces of the artists behind Augn fails piece by piece and video by video due to their role poetry. In “Father’s Day” the offended man roars in his misogynistic bubble. In “Bill Gates”, the maverick maniacally whispers the name of his enemy like an exorcist and bursts out into hysterical laughter.
From me to you
But it’s not just conventional angry citizens who have their say: In “Berghain” a young new Berliner finds himself disoriented in front of Berghain on Saturday afternoon while his worried parents are talking to him on the phone. In “Deutschrap ist tot” someone complains on behalf of the Fanta 4 generation: “All this gangster behavior and insulting mothers. Then there is this glorification of weapons and teaming up with mafia circles, sorry, that’s not my German rap anymore!” He advertises for the CDU. “Now we always have to feel like victims because we’re fucking rich college kids!”
In “RTL” someone from a more left-green milieu confesses to dirty fun: “Horny, finally jungle camp again, my circle of friends is academic and also well-read, but every now and then you have to feel like one of the normal people!” It is always those who are meant who speak.
But once Augn change perspective. In “Very Sad Victim Type” the I becomes a you: “You feel excluded and taken for a ride because of your dialect, people from your state are taken for a ride everywhere, you’re practically the joke of all left-leaning mainstream media systemlings, but you hold your ground and are just like the people who everything is still allowed and nothing is forbidden.” Here, too, the video takes place in the east, showing an angry canned beer drinker in front of his renovated prefabricated building. His singing sympathizer, the advocate of the East, becomes a dialectical figure. The Ossi is dwarfed to the very last upright – and presented.
Augn are celebrated as the German Sleaford Mods. As with the Sleaford Mods from Nottingham, someone scolds into his microphone and someone programs the bass and the beats. What the Brits called “Tweet Tweet Tweet”, a foaming tirade against social media, Augn calls “Ficki Ficki” and “My Ass”, “Bitcoin” and “Vintage”. Taunting hymns on Tinder, Instagram, the digital existence in general. “Somehow I have to push my social media game again, somehow quite a few impressions lately, so according to my insights, somehow I find substantial content very important,” the singer and narrator states in “My Ass” and explains : “I hate haters because they’re always hating.”
The Sleaford Mods are analog haters because they are moralists. Augn are cynics who know that the digital public has created the characters they play and voice. Anonymously and with silly stocking masks, as trolls playing music and as dummies on stage.
Even the announcements before each piece and the applause afterwards are recorded. “Now it’s getting cleaned up, our government is converting the police to Corsa patrol cars!” “The Saxons invented Corona and are getting vaccinated for a bratwurst!” “Tempo 30, you can do that, Berlin!” Augn are a fun guerrilla of humorless humor of the parapublic filter bubbles. Against everything, against the murmuring and yelling out there, actually against anyone who thinks their world view is the true one: they still exist, the philistines, but they have never been as diverse as they are today.
In this way, however, Augn also circumnavigate the dilemmas of their colleagues, who have dedicated themselves to the new type of protest song: Deichkind has been rumbling hedonistically through wide-open doors for 25 years (“Weep in the Bentley too”), with Danger Dan people also sing his songs, the were never invited (“That’s all covered by artistic freedom”).
Augn disappear behind their unpolished sounds and their many voices. They wrote “CDU” on the club’s wall, awkwardly with adhesive tape. Next to them stand their rigid emissaries. And there they dance, grinning and waving, in front of their puppet stage and mingling with the crowd. You could also be Berliners.
Augn: “You will see / cataracts” (Isbessa music)
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