hobbykeller festival #3

In the organizer's words:

hobbykeller festival emergency edition!

25.10.2025 doors: 18:00 noise 19:00 (sharp!)

Since the Schmitz und Kunzt was closed by the building inspectorate of the city of Cologne, a reduced but great program with Kou, Able Noise and Milkweed will take place on 25.10.25 in the Asimmetric Bar. The performances of the projects/bands Liegenaar, licht-ung and Das Günther will be rescheduled for a later date. Due to the volume and time restrictions it is not possible to play all projects in the Asimmetric Bar :(.

ABLE NOISE
Baritone guitar and drum duo Able Noise experiments the physicality of music performance through voice, tape and unconventional methods of playing their instruments. They craft a minimal, immersive performance that blends free improvisation and elemental rock. Their recorded work relies less on their respective instruments, and more on an assemblage of field recordings, heavily processed instrumentation, and exploratory mixing techniques. Their output is primarily focused on live concerts, letting their music be shaped by the acoustic and aesthetic properties of the space, and the dynamics formed between themselves and their audience.
bandcamp
https://ablenoise.bandcamp.com/album/high-tide
facebook
https://www.facebook.com/this.is.able.noise

DAS GÜNTHER
Das Günther - has been mixing up the alternative techno, party and festival scene (Fusion, Sysiphos Berlin, Chaos Communication Congress, etc.) with their improvisational spectacle for 7 years. With the album "Strawberry Gelato" 08.03.2024, the band is putting out feelers in the direction of post-punk and indie for the first time with classic songwriting, without losing their roots for the political, outlandish and danceable.

Günther's mother describes her child as follows: "Party! Party! Depressed! Depri!" For some, Günther needs therapy, for others Günther is therapy. Like a shabby clown, Günther leads not only the audience but also himself around by the nose. Günther doesn't write songs, he invents them on stage. Günther is punk, clown and mummy all at the same time.

The fans of Das Günther often describe the band from Hanover a little differently: "You have to have seen Das Günther live, otherwise you won't understand them"; "WTF, was that?" or "Did they just change their costumes seven times while they were singing?". After minutes of singing along to text fragments such as Mit Staub Geschwängert, Im Darkroom Sind Wir Alle Geschwister or Allein Auf Ecstasy and dancing their bodies empty, one or two lines of text still find their personal meaning on the pillow or in the dreams of the concertgoers.

KOU
- A project by Apolline Schöser (half of Nina Harker) & Thomas Coquelet.

Rewires your brain for the better

Apolline & Thomas have been performing since 2022 under the KOU guise with 24 electronic harmoniums. Producing dense layers of tones & overtones. On their debut album KOU steers in another direction. The harmonium appears occasionally, but more prominent are delicate guitar pluckings, distant vocal effects, synths, flutes, piano strokes, a touch of musical magic and Apolline's jazz not jazz vocals.

About their first album:
As soon as the needle drops it's clear we are jump-cutting straight to the other side of the mirror. Cats purr, a woman sings as if asleep, drum machines stutter and warp and Alvin Lucier is not 'sitting in a room that is not different to the one you are not in now'. If you're already confused, join the club. But, it's the good kind of confused, a bewildering experience akin to the first time hearing the Faust Tapes or watching Inland Empire. Wait though, as pigeons coo and the tape machine clunk-clicks a gorgeous weirdo version of Roger's and Hart's Blue Moon emerges to let you know this isn't just dada splurge, there's a genius pop sensibility at work here too. Side two takes us further into the murk with mournful detuned brass, stoned Joan La Barbara-esque vocalese and a droning Farfisa hymn, before ending with another too-tempting snatch of DIY pop. Some of the references are recognizable. All kinds of 70s/80s European art prog - think early Battiato, Pierot Lunaire's Gudrun, Lucia Bosè and Gregorio Paniagua's Io Pomodoro etc etc. There's a strong whiff of 90s us goof-off surrealism too- Bongwater, Siltbreeze, Royal Trux's Twin infinitives, the damaged folkier side of Alastair Galbraith, Half-Japanese, early Beck even all feel relevant.

Like an oddball group of friends you might meet by chance and end up weirding-out with for days, the minds behind this deliciously odd music allow you to stay for a while in their strange subcultural world. You might not want to live here forever but a short trip, while it lasts, rewires your brain for the better.

LIGHT-UNG
In the middle of the forest. Suddenly there was a clearing - cryptic minimal aesthetics, no names, no titles, but insane noise and sound excursions.
noise and sound excursions. Licht-ung: poetry, essays, pictures, photos and... music. They call it punk no rock. All the concerts that have taken place so far have been different - completely different.
The hobby cellar is tense - twisted crackling - pumping rumbling - shaggy dancing

LIEGENAAR
is an experimental improvisation duo from Antwerp. Their practice takes on different forms reaching from noise performances and sound installations to food art.

With an ever-changing set-up they construct an atmosphere that is both welcoming and hostile at the same time. They are interested in using a variety of lo-fi techniques and sound sources like tape recordings, diy electronics and found objects. This results in a mixture of murky vocalizations layered upon dissonant drones glued together with handmade and manipulated instruments carefully beaten to pulp.

Liegenaar is a (childish) corruption of the word liar. It is an accusation that is rendered harmless by the naivety that creeps into it.

MILKWEED
describe their sound as slacker-trad, which is both true and somehow insufficient. For three years Milkweed have refined a formula - taking existing source material (a folklore journal, a book on Welsh myths, another on bronze age human remains and most recently Thomas Kinsella's masterfully strong translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge), cutting up the words and feeding them through a woodchipper of lo-fi production and experimental folk music.

On the face of it their musical concerns are transatlantic - they follow the rich creative line that runs between British traditional music and the songs and tunes of the eastern United States. In reality their scope is global, and rooted in deep time, with influences from prehistory bleeding into a troubled and troubling modern era. As a result their music doesn't sit easily anywhere, but ricochets between bewitching folk music and disconcerting hauntological experimentation.

Milkweed's anonymity isn't affected, R. from Milkweed insists. "We don't wear masks, you can come to a show and say hi. We're not gonna be weird. But in terms of me trying to sound interesting? I'm not a very interesting person."

More info: https://hobbykeller.info