Artist: Geeez 'N' Gosh
Search Term: "Gosh"
Germany-to-Chile transplant Uwe Schmidt has recorded under so many aliases he makes Stephin Merritt and Markus Acher seem like shiftless underachievers, and although fully familiarizing myself with his discography would require me to set aside an entire autumn, the Schmidt projects I've heard in the past have all been knockouts. Whether he's letting fly with damaged space-junk glitch covers of Prince, David Bowie, and Donovan (LB's masterful Pop Artificielle), clattering ambient experimentation (DATacide's self-titled album), or lovingly arranged Latin-pop renderings of Kraftwerk's greatest hits (Senor Coconut's El Baile Aleman), Schmidt's wealth of ideas and his commitment to seeing them through to fruition makes each project a distinct, pleasurable creation rather than a simple Robert Pollard-style naming exercise in confounding the completists. (Now that I think about it, though, I would be willing to forgive much of Pollard's evasive discographical leapfrogging if he cut to the chase and released an album called Confounding the Completists.)
So I was thrilled that Geeez 'N' Gosh turned out to be a Schmidt project that was heretofore unknown to me, and I'm even happier to discover that it lives up to his standards for compelling rhythms and unpredictable sounds. Over a beat that keeps stumbling along like it has a handful of Lite-Brite pegs in its shoe, the heavily distorted voice of a preacher (I guess) repeatedly exclaims, "Jesus knows the way!" resulting in a laptop house homage to Brian Eno and David Byrne's religion-heavy proto-electronica album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. There's nothing close to a melody here, but the corrupted-data buzzes and shards that appear throughout appeal to me just as much as any actual tune is likely to, it's danceable beyond all reason, and I for one can't wait to further explore this corner of Schmidt's chiliagonal oeuvre.
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