Ballet of the melted men

Melt­ed Men (USA/FRA/NED) ///
Bul­bul (AUT) ///

Sat, April 11 2004, 20:00 /// 
Cafe-the­atre and bal­let school MAESTRO (for­mer cin­e­ma “Apol­lo”), Linz ///

Melt­ed Men are back! After their appear­ance in the Grot­ten­bahn inside of the Pöstling­berg in Linz two years ago the mad per­for­mance group was banned from Linz for one year. Back then Melt­ed Men turned rhetoric in action and cut the toe nails of the dwarfs and fairy tale fig­ures to smoke them after­wards togeth­er with the audi­ence. On this year’s Euro­pean tour they will hit Linz again. For their per­for­mance this time Melt­ed Men have cho­sen the for­mer cin­e­ma “Apol­lo” at the Hes­sen­platz. Mean­while the the­atre and bal­let school MAESTRO is locat­ed at that place.

So, what is more log­i­cal than to adapt the exist­ing con­cepts of Melt­ed Mens musi­cal work to the space? But – which con­cepts? Once in an inter­view Melt­ed Men gave the fol­low­ing answer on the ques­tion how their music is cre­at­ed: “Take a polaroid of Melt­ed Men and slice it quick­ly to expose the chem­i­cals. Than cov­er the streets with cloths and put the chem­i­cals on the hoofs of a goat. Let this goat run wher­ev­er it wants and burn the cloths after­wards. Take the ash and put it back into the polaroid. At least you take a pic­ture of any­thing. That’s how things develop.”

Melt­ed Men tru­ly are the gods among the per­for­mance groups world­wide. Whilst they spin around on stilts in rab­bit cos­tumes and with 40 cig­a­rettes in their mouth, teach the audi­ence arbi­trary hop­scotch rit­u­als with bam­boo sticks and eat the hands, ears and noses of fun­ny look­ing voodoo pup­pets made out of car­rots, they tell sto­ries about Fran­cois Mit­terand who sits in a Ger­man pineap­ple and earned a plumber diplo­ma for some rea­son to build a pipeline between Bre­men and Flori­da. All of the above, com­bined with musi­cal ingre­di­ents like min­i­mal drums, crazy squeak-elec­tron­ic, groan­ing, moan­ing and quack­ing, car horns or jin­gles leaves the audi­ence every sin­gle con­cert pend­ing between men­tal break­downs and enthu­si­as­tic orgasms.

They will be sup­port­ed by the for­mi­da­ble Bul­bul from Vien­na. Noise rock’n’roll, reduced to the max­i­mum, pow­er­ful like a full horde of Melvins. Quo­ta­tion of them­selves: “The Bul­bul are play­ing faster than any moun­tain and are able to eat like the woodchoppers.”

www.meltedmen.com
www.bulbul.at

(Camera/Editing: qujOchÖ)

(Camera/Editing: qujOchÖ)