Royal Flush by Locust Fudge

Flush & Royal Flush are available as 2 x LP at:
http://kapitaen-platte.de/?wpsc-product=pre-order-locust-fudge-flushroyal-flush-2lp

LOCUST FUDGE

In 1991, Schneider (back then singer, songwriter, and guitarist with Hip Young Things) and Krite (then singer, songwriter, and guitarist with the Speed Niggs) founded the duo Locust Fudge and started playing acoustic versions of their original bands' semi-hits to ignorant audiences in the streets of their hometowns.

What began as an excuse to hang out together quickly drew the attention of Reinhard Holstein, CEO of Glitterhouse Records, the European business arm for Seattle's Sub Pop label, home to the likes of Nirvana, Mudhoney, and others who were about to define a new hype soon to be known as "Grunge". Holstein encouraged Locust Fudge to record an album for his label. Their acoustic guitar-driven debut album, Flush, was released in 1993, receiving widespread media coverage all over Europe.

After touring as a duo for quite a while, Schneider and Krite recorded their ground-breaking follow-up, Royal Flush, in 1994, a milestone of "Lo-Fi Glam-Folk" to this very day. The album’s delicate arrangements demanded a somewhat bigger live sound, and thus the 5-piece LOCUST FUDGE BAND was formed to go on the road with the new material.
After extensive touring throughout Europe, LOCUST FUDGE released the EP "Business Express" in 1996. Besides working with LOCUST FUDGE, Schneider and Krite had released numerous albums, toured extensively with their bands Hip Young Things and Sharon Stoned, and worked on different side projects.

By the end of the 1990s, Schneider and Krite had moved to Berlin. Alongside Japanese performance artist Hanayo, they reunited in the noise-pop outfit PAINCAKE and performed in unusual surroundings like the Urbanization Congress Cities on the Move 6 in Bangkok 1999, the opening of the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2001, an exhibition opening at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and many others.
After the band's demise in 2002, Schneider and Krite went separate ways for a while. Schneider, who had been involved with electronic music for many years, would become a global trailblazer for a music genre known as Indietronica with Schneider TM and his hits Reality Check, Frogtoise, and his The Smiths cover version The Light 3000, which were hugely acclaimed not only by John Peel. Schneider co-founded the noise-and-drone band (die) ANGEL with Ilpo Väisänen (Pan sonic), was a member of the three-guitar outfit A S S with Günter Schickert and Jochen Arbeit (Einstürzende Neubauten), and has worked on experimental music in a variety of collaborations as well as being a composer for film, radio plays, performance theater, and other media.

During the first years of the new millennium, Krite produced albums for bands like Ragazzi, The Innits, and Julia Hummer's Too Many Boys. Becoming musical director for the René Pollesch play Prater Saga 4 at the Volksbühne Berlin in 2004 marked the beginning of a long-term artistic partnership with director Stefan Pucher; they're working together continuously at theaters in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Zürich, and elsewhere to this day. Aside from writing for She She Pop, Krite collaborated with the British-German performance collective Gob Squad to create the show Revolution Now!, which has been invited to tour all over Europe and South America since its Berlin premiere in 2010.

Amid those diverse activities, irregular vital signs of LOCUST FUDGE could be witnessed: random shows in Berlin and the Song Cannibal Man, featured on PERVERTED BY MARK E. - A TRIBUTE TO THE FALL by ZickZack Records fueled the rumor of LOCUST FUDGE re- surfacing at some point in the 21st century, being neither denied nor confirmed, until their first two albums FLUSH and ROYAL FLUSH were re-released on vinyl in 2014, and the band embarked on their first tour in 20 years as trio w/ Japanese drummer Chikara Aoshima to present the classic material alongside a bunch of new songs. In 2018 they released their album OSCILLATION featuring 10 new songs and numerous guest appearances by the likes of J Mascis, Chris Brokaw, Zappi W Diermaier, Julia Wilton, Wolfgang Seidel, Lucio Capece, Ulrich Krieger, Gwendolin Tägert, Lars Rudolph, Günter Schickert and others.

Royal Flush:

„Royal Flush“ is the second album of Schneider’s and Krite’s long time project Locust Fudge. Originally released on CD in 1995 on Glitterhouse Records, „Royal Flush“ was almost entirely recorded on a cheap 4-track cassette recorder at Schneider’s house in Bielefeld. The newly found freedom of recording without any financial pressure in a homerecording-type way gave room to a rather experimental approach towards the new material, expanding way beyond Schneider’s and Krite’s roots of 80ies indie rock and folk music. Locust Fudge surrounded themselves with a pile of junk keyboards, broken guitars, trashy amplifiers, crap rhythm machines and budget microphones to explore the boundaries of the new songs written on and off touring with their debut album. Lacking a sampler in those days, Locust Fudge started to play all kinds of loops to simulate the possibilities they didn’t have and thus came up with a new sound that was completely different from the indie rock approach of their other early 90ies bands and projects, though still featuring their well-renowned songwriting. The release of „Royal Flush“ was highly acclaimed internationally and followed by extensive touring of the 5-piece Locust Fudge Band, establishing Schneider’s and Krite’s reputation as entertainers capable of extending 90-minute-sets up to three hours by harassing audiences with their challenging sense of humour – another side of Locust Fudge that could first be heard on „Royal Flush“, but only if you carefully read between the lines.

MirrorWorldMusic is a label, archive, and publishing imprint for diverse idiosyncratic music projects that are linked in some way by their protagonists. The diversity of the stylistic scope, spanning from adventurous indie-/krautrock, improv, drone, noise, abstract electronic (pop-) music etc., is unified by an overarching experimental approach and multi-minded spirit.

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