Headed by the incredibly busy Gerald Donald — formerly of Drexciya and one-time partner in crime with the late James Stinson – Dopplereffekt may hail from Detroit, but their sound is still unmistakably auf Deutschland. If you remember any of a number of classic scenes from The Big Lebowski, a few of them are probably tied to the Nihilists, those inept thugs who peed all over Lebowski’s rug and ran in place with huge pairs of scissors to German techno music. You might even remember the vinyl LP for that band AUTOBAHN, one of several Kraftwerk-inspired Krautrock electronica records that Jeff thumbed through at Maude Lebowski’s loft. Dopplereffekt would probably have been somewhere in one of Maude’s crates. Don’t get the wrong idea — most of that German influence probably resides in the lyrics, spoken matter-of-factly, yet in a very German, Dieter-From-Sprockets kind of way: In “PornoActress”, a digitized, modulated voice speaks “WATCHING YOU ON THE SCREEN”, followed by a girl who murmurs her own robotic cadence: “I want to be…a porno star…” ad infinitum. The theme continues with “Pornoviewer”: “I love to watch…pornographic moo-vies…” Which makes me think of another Big Lebowski scene. Don’t think of this as perverted, so much as just German, yet brimming with the best of the best Detroit has given us. It’s all in the funk, the beats, the rhythms. You get the idea. Now get a listen on Red Bull Music Academy Radio.
