** 2025 stock ** Zungsang, finds Joke Lanz exploring the frontier where noise, performance, and improvisation collapse into an uneasy alliance. Unfolding across fourteen compact tracks, the album acts as a fevered cartography of the mind, full of jagged percussive gestures, sudden eruptions of voice, and carefully constructed chaos. From the opening moments, Lanz plunges listeners into a landscape marked by distortion, abrupt cuts, and uncanny narrative detours—a terrain where meaning emerges and dissolves, demanding active engagement.
Lanz, well established as a key figure in the intersection of body art, noise, and improvisation, channels a history of outsider artistry into compositions that are as physically immediate as they are conceptually dense. Each track is a fragment, a vignette of frenetic intent, oscillating between visceral humor and existential unease, keeping potential expectations at a distance. The pieces, referencing everything from folklore to personal myth, seem less interested in resolution than in compulsion, reflecting Lanz's commitment to both observation and sonic sabotage. The production, assembled in Berlin and mastered at Lager Studios, integrates contributions from various collaborators on voices and percussion, with the specter of Adolf Wölfli hovering as a spiritual patron.
Where some albums in this idiom might collapse under the weight of abstraction, Zungsangretains a sly sense of play, finding a world both grotesque and oddly animate in the everyday. The work has been described as “a hallucinating journey through a dark and surreal universe,” blending Lanz's signature sharpness with a compassion that keeps the record from mere provocation. It's a listening experience not for the faint of heart or for those seeking comfort, but rather for those willing to encounter sound as an act of critical attention, a shifting negotiation between order and delirium. Lanz's output persists in challenging not only genre but the expectations that any audience might bring to experimental work, pursuing the unresolved, the uneasy, and the vital, well beyond the bounds of conventional music listening.
