condition (records/cover): NM /  NM

Edition of 500 copies with gatefold sleeve. No booklet.

The twenty-year retrospective of Joke Lanz's Sudden Infant project, released in December 2009 on Berlin's Hrönir Records as a substantial four-LP set (two separate gatefold double-LPs) limited to 500 copies. Forty-nine tracks compiled and selected by Lanz with Hrönir label-head Ed Benndorf, mastered by Rashad Becker at D+M, designed by Bill Kouligas, paintings by Lanz himself.

The title phrase is literal. In 1978, Lanz's father Max Lanz (1939-1978), a passionate mountaineer, climbed onto the roof of his Basel apartment building and shot himself with his Swiss army rifle. Joke Lanz was in the waiting room of a doctor's office a few doors away; he remembers hearing the gunshot. GX Jupitter-Larsen's four-page essay (included as a twelve-inch-square booklet) opens with that event, and the set is explicitly dedicated to Max Lanz.

The compilation's forty-nine tracks run from Sudden Infant's 1989 debut 7" Broken Glass (which came with an accompanying shard of broken glass) through cassette releases on underground tape-labels to the Entr'acte and iDEAL-Recordings phase of the late 2000s. Stylistically the set is consistent with the "industrial musique concrète" label Lanz's work had attracted: contact-microphone rituals, metal-on-metal punk, organic noise eviscerations, dark drone pieces, body-horror action-music. The definitive document of one of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe's core figures.