Caspar Brötzmann is something of a minor deity in the German alternative music scene. He’s the son of avant sax mangler Peter, and like his father, he’s taken a defiantly individual approach to playing his instrument, which in Caspar’s case is the good old electric guitar. Now, around the end of the 80s, the whole ‘reinvention of the guitar’ schtick was very popular, especially among the perennially over-excited ranks of the British music press. Praise was heaped (with some justification) on everybody from Sonic Youth and Big Black in the US, to MBV and even the flipping House of Love over here… but none of them were doing what Brötzmann was.

‘Der Abend Der Schwarzen Folklore’ (roughly The Evening of Black Folklore — great title, and very apposite) was Brötzmann’s third album with his band Massaker, the power trio to end all power trios. How to describe the Brötzmann sound? Well, imagine standing underneath a bomb as it scythes into the earth, metal melting and buildings collapsing around you in the fire storm. Throw in some riffs that sound like they’ve been fashioned out of molten rock, and a voice that would frighten Lemmy… 

More prosaically, Brötzmann has been likened to Hendrix, in that both players have taken the raw material prevalent at the time (blues/rock) and turned it into something new and revelatory. And while the aforementioned ‘re-inventors of the guitar’ achieved new sounds via distortion, tunings or effects, Hendrix and Brötzmann have created something unheard of before by the way that they actually play. Hendrix’s early audiences were left thinking ‘how is he making his guitar do that?’ Brötzmann has the listener thinking ‘how has he conceived of playing the guitar like that?’

‘Der Abend…’ features four extended meditations on the power of the bottom end. Brötzmann’s guitar playing on this album is stunningly single-minded, rarely approaching the higher registers, but exploring every possibilibilty in the lower frequencies. While clearly there is an improvisational aspect to what Brötzmann is doing, there is never any sense that the songs are allowed to get out of control. The vicarious thrill of a scorched earth policy in operation throughout is palpable.

First up is ‘Schwarze Folklore’ itself. Immediately, the guitar sucks all the light out of the room, playing not so much a riff as a sustained barrage of chords, occasionally punctuated by the sound of drums being walloped within an inch of their lives. It’s like morse code tapped out by a storm. This goes on for some time until the guitar spirals up towards a plateau of spooky harmonics and ambient feedback, giving space for Caspar to have a word… 

Brötzmann’s vocal delivery is the very definition of ‘guttural’. God knows what he’s going on about (this is the only track on the album sung in German), but whatever it is, it sounds pretty terrifying (though of course that’s just my opinion — a former girlfriend with a thing for the German language was reduced to orgasmic jelly by Caspar’s harsh stentorian tones). Then the main guitar returns, and the vocals multiply into a massed chorus of berserkers. The effect is quite bracing. Cue final assault and battery from the drummer and the track’s over. Already I feel like I’ve been route-marched halfway across Europe.

Next is ‘Bass Totem’ (another great title). The guitar slow-burns for the first few minutes, feedback flames leaping into the sky as more petrol gets thrown onto the fire. Then Brötzmann delivers a vocal which actively flirts with the concept of melody, albeit one last sung by Visigoth warriors pillaging Rome. The guitar alternately growls and whines in approval, the singing gets ever more invocatory, and the drums start to beat out a military tattoo. 

Just when the song sounds like it’s run its course, and we’re back to the fire, there’s a stop… and a Hendrix-style hard funk riff explodes from the speakers that’s of such extraordinary heaviousity, it makes you jump right out of your seat. This really is one of those moments when you can’t quite believe how brain-pummellingly brilliant a riff is, and if nothing else, you should try and hear this album just for this song.

‘Sarah’ is track three. This may (or may not) be Brötzmann’s concession to an individual human heart, but it’s still soundtracked by a blitzkrieg of feedback circling overhead. Caspar sings in despairing slow motion over a rollercoaster of wailing guitar, before a pounding, pre-industrial rhythm shunts the whole thing on a vertiginous and terminal downhill slide.

As you might be able to tell by now, images of armies marching through blackened, primordial landscapes spring to mind almost irresistably throughout the course of this album. The music is incredibly physical, a soundclash of some dread cataclysmic technology with the cruel beauty of the natural world. But if some of the images I’ve used here might seem a little insensitive given Brötzmann’s nationality, the final track seems to make a clear connection between ancient traditions and the dark heart of 20th century Europe…

‘Warhorse’ is perhaps the most ‘conventional’ of the four tracks, driven by a frantically strummed guitar that nevertheless sounds like its been strung with steel cables. Brötzmann sings the story of the ‘sleeping warhorse’, waiting for years, until the guitar drops away for Caspar to warn us ‘don’t… wake it up!’ Then the barbarian hordes are released, and the theme continues with crashing drums and pounding bass. 

It’s difficult (and certainly presumptive) to say whether or not the song’s imagery refers to the restless and often grim history of Brötzmann’s own country, but the words (and music) seem to reflect a fear of exactly the type of extremist resurgence we’ve seen recently in the ‘civilised’ west. As the ‘old order’ stirs its ugly head once again, this track, and in fact the whole album, becomes disturbingly resonant.

Brötzmann’s more recent recordings such as ‘Mute Massaker’ have taken a more exploratory, and perhaps less focused direction (though as he curtly told an interviewer in an online zine I read while researching this piece, ‘I have nothing to do with free jazz!’). He also seems to have stopped singing, which is a great shame. But for all that, Caspar Brötzmann remains a singular and exciting presence in the music underground — if you haven’t come across him before, or maybe just dismissed him as an unlistenable noise fetishist, then get hold of this album and prepare to be blown away.