Laub

Laub, the German duo of vocalist Antye Greie-Fuchs and keyboardist Jotka (Juergen Kuehn), on the album Kopflastig (Kitty-Yo, 1997) concocted creative rhythms and alien textures, not unlike compatriotes Mouse On Mars and To Rococo Rot, but enhanced by Bjork-ian song structures. The range is quite broad, from Miniversum, a sensual witchy lament over a skitting, undulating and pulsating liquid beat, to the ethereal disorienting trip-hop Mikado, from the slippery whisper and oneiric arrangement of Himmelblauer to the alien trance-psychedelic jamming of Vielleicht, with a peak of instrumental creativity in the intricate bossanova-esque industrial syncopation of Im Innern Ist Es. The music veers into theater with the dissonant kammerspiel Tanze, a crescendo of tension amid industrial polyrhythms and Bjork-ian "recitation". Frenzied Latin-inspired beats propel the angelic elegy of Trau and the dreamy lullaby Erinner. Every song is an elaborate construction of beats, vocals and electronic decoration. The four-song EP Miniversum (Kitty-Yo, 1997) adds the disfigured soul ballad Entgegen to the repertory, besides reprising Vielleicht, Frei and Tanze.

Tritop was a side project (AGF, Jotka and Marko Timlin) that played more streamlined dance-music on the EP Reume/Kai (Infrcom, 1998) and on the album Rosenwinkel (Infracom, 1998). Timlin then left and was replaced by Sebastian Vogel and Tritop became again Laub.

Laub's most elegant and sophisticated work, Unter anderen Bedingungen als Liebe (Kitty-Yo, 1999), contains generally easier songs, like the simple melody drenched in boiling synth lines Symbolisch, the soul lament over fibrillating funk lines Widergefuehlich, and the velvety soul ballad Augenscheinlich. The more experimental side bridges 40 years of German experiments, from Can to Mouse On Mars. Selten is a rhythmic tour de force, and Losigkeit an industrial nightmare. The eight-minute Einaeugig dissolves into a dust of pulsations. The 14-minute suite Grau floats in a space of lazy beats, timid whispers, burbling synth, and broken guitar melodies, a world of flotsam and jetsam from which eventually a rousing chant emerges.

Intuition (Kitty-Yo, 1999) is the remix album.

Laub pared down again to the original duo for Filesharing (Kitty-Yo, 2002), a work that departs from the creative structures and rhythms of their earlier works and sails towards a calmer pop-soul genre. The duo of Antye Greie-Fuchs and Jotka have the talent and the background to fuse pop and glitch music, particularly in gentle lullabies such as Wortspur. Unfortunately, it sounds like most of the material on this album was not carefully composed, arranged or performed. It sounds like it was assembled in a hurry to put out an album, when an EP would have been enough.

Antye Greie-Fuchs (or AGF) released the solo albums Head Slash Bauch (Orthlorng Musork, 2002) and Westernization Completed (Orthlorng Musork, 2003), that contain cubist puzzles of voice and rhythm as if she had shuffled the chronology of a stream of consciousness. The former (23 brief pieces) employs lyrics based on software data, whereas the latter has more personal stories to tell. Her vocal style is recitation rather than singing, somewhere between Brecht's theater and a chanteuse's movie. Both albums are erudite, replete with references to the literary, artistic and musical avantgarde. The former is a more abstract exercise of vocal and electronic experiments, like the maze of (vocal) mirrors of Zwangsam Schwierig or the musique concrete of Hand. The latter is perhaps more emotional. Rhythms (mostly fractured, distorted, morphed) are employed only to the extent to grant menacing (the bleak drones and metallic noises of the instrumental Ambienttrust) or disorienting (PrivatebirdS, a sophisticated collage for her whispered recitation, the stuttering Youstop) qualities to her futuristic collages. If Poemproducer and Contemporarywesternized approach the format of the pop-soul ballad, it is only because the rest inhabits a distant stylistic galaxy, where genres are diffracted by several layers of time warping. The album deconstructs musical styles to an extent that has rarely been attempted before: ghostly dance music (Re Fail), lobotomized free jazz (Leaving With Hope), castrated synth-pop (Mypatch), etc.

AGF's Language Is The Most (Quecksilber, 2004) documents a live performance. Explode (2005) was a (rather monotonous) collaboration with Vladislav Delay. Nature Never Produces the Same Beat Twice (Nexsound, 2006) was a (minimal) collaboration with Ukrainian composer Zavoloka in which AGF only offered her voice.

Laub's

Deinetwegen (2006) was a blues album.

AGF's Mini Movies (Asphodel, 2006) was a collaboration between Antye Greie-Fuchs and San Francisco's multi-media artist Sue Costabile, and, musically, it mainly consisted of sendups of soul ballads.

AGF's Words Are Missing (AGF, 2008) returned to the espressionist art of Westernization Completed, an art rooted in the vocabularies of industrial, techno and ambient music. Its extreme manifestation is the hyper-psychedelic musique concrete of pieces like Words are Useless and Mohr Und Die Raben Von London. Her vocal expressions have become more and more metaphysically rudimentary and drowned in Delay-style digital structures. The manipulation of vocals helps to produce industrial music soundscapes (i>Letters Make No Meaning) or horror soundscapes (Presswehen).

Lappetites' Before The Libretto (Quecksilber, 2005) was a collaboration among Eliane Radigue (France), Kaffe Matthews (Britain), Ryoko Kuwajima (Japan), and Antye Greie-Fuchs (Germany), basically a multinational laptop quartet ranging in age from the 70-year old Radigue to the Japanese teenager.

AGF still released Dance Floor Drachen (2008), that contains rarities and remixes, Symptoms (2009), a collaboration with Sasu "Delay" Ripatti, Einzelkaempfer (2009), wrapped in a psychedelic fog that sometimes indulges in extreme cacophony (We Break Out, Worin Mein Mund Zur Bewegung Fand, Einzelkaempfer), Orlando (2011), a soundtrack for a theatrical staging of Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando" that also includes music by Craig Armstrong, and Beatnadel (2011), a mostly uninspired work of deconstruction of digital beats (except for Beatnadeln and Massaker).

AGF's Source Voice (2013), her most significant work in several years, opens with the droning voices of The Human Condition, that set a mood of melancholy tragedy, and then plunges into the hissing void of the eleven-minute Breathing in Lines. The wordless ritual continues with the ten-minute ghostly atmosphere of Digital Yoik, and ends with the 21-minute cosmic mirage of Feed Back (a collaboration with Richard Chartier).

She also recorded albums of poetry works: Gedichterbe (2011), 28 brief texts by female poets of the last 10 centuries, Kuuntele (2013), dedicated to female Finnish poetry, A Deep Mysterious Tone (2015), dedicated to female Japanese poetry, and Dissidentova (2018), dedicated to female Russian poetry.

Her prolific career continued with: Kon:3p>UTION to: e[VOL]ution (2016), a collection of abstract sound poems with occasional recited lyrics, Solidicity (2017), focused on manipulated field recordings and containing the eight-minute MICOrrhyzosphere, Commissioned Work (2019), containing commissioned audio pieces, Poemproducer (2023), another indulgent set of electronic poems and spoken word, Netmotif (2024), containing 24 brief pieces, plus many EPs such as >if*true~time[x]1+2=you.\< (2016), The Self/ The Other (2016), Greim EP (2016), Unity XEN (2016), DRONE theories (2016), DISoriented MINDsets (2017), Groove 5 (2017), IX-ccc-hel (2019), GaiA (2019), RyJ (2020), Uttu (2023), etc.