Cleaning Women Live in Berlin 2/3

12.2.2003 Berlin, Germany, (Enthuziasm-screening)
http://www.cleaningwomen.com/
http://www.myspace.com/cleaningwome

CAUTION!
CLEANING IN PROGRESS!

Its a joke, right?
Three guys in drag, clinking away like monkeys in heat at their home-made instruments made out of clotheshorses and pickle jars, hollering vaguely nonsensical slogans about the importance of cleaning Thats not exactly asking for the music to be taken too seriously, right?

Wrong.
Granted, you may be excused to have entertained such heretic notions, if you have not been lucky enough to have witnessed any of the Cleaning Womens hundreds of packed club or art-house performances, where your jaw would most likely have dropped at the sight of their supreme skill and prowess. Despite the apparent flimsiness of their self-customized drying racks, their sound and teamwork are tight and sturdy in a punkjazz kinda way, and despite the undisputably avantgardian approach, the actual songs are danceable and easy to relate to, with enough nuances to transcend most genre boundaries.
Intergalactic industrial disco rock, somebody came up with, ambient afro-techno riff crunch, tried another one, really NEAT music, most people realize all of which are proven to be mere understatements by the ambiguously-named debut album Pulsator.

The powder trio consists of cleaning robots (on a cleaning mission from the planet Clinus 1) codenamed CW04 (Tero Vänttinen), CW03 (Timo Kinnunen), and CW01 (Risto Puurunen), the latter of whom made the original discovery that when you place a clothes hanger on a clotheshorse it makes a rather interesting, clinking sound. After an epiphany of such earth-shattering proportions CW01 started adding contact microphoness, effects and home-made electric stringed instruments to his rack and before he knew it, he had a truly new sound at his disposal. And as the whole cleaning crew possesses enough musical vision to incorporate influences from such ridiculously wide-ranging genres as industrial, ambient, punk, world musics, techno, jazz and heavy rifforama rock, you can for once speak of a style truly of their own. Whats more, they manage to do all that without stooping to gratuitous art for arts sake, and actually entertain pretty heterogenic crossover crowds.

No wonder, then, that the hygienic threesome have been able to spread their gospel of cleaning in some ten different countries already even before releasing their first record.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Cleaning Women
• music
• berlin
• movie soundtrack
• live