www.mo-artgallery.com

JOHN BOCK

 

Record and Trousers, 2 x 7“ single with an original drawing, signed and numbered (# 01/200-70/200), 2015

Unique pair of trousers with unique painting, edition 70 (# 01/70-70/70), signed and numbered, 2015
€ 300,- record and single

 

 

 

 

Record, 2 x 7“ single, edition 200 (130: # 71-200/200), signed and numbered, 2015
€ 80,-

 

 

The first interaction of John Bock and Aydo Abay took place back in 2006 for the theatrical play „Medusa“ at the Berliner Staatsoper. Abay remembers this as “a twenty day Doom-Opera, in which space and time switched positions." In 2010 they joined forces once again for a fashion show titled „Die abgeschmierte Knicklenkung im Gepäck verheddert sich im weissen Hemd“ in the World Culture House in Berlin.

Given these previous artistic collaborations, we decided to ask John Bock to go further and join Adyo Abay for a real studio session working on songs together. And so we are very happy to announce four songs which leaded to the Edition Fieber double-vinyl-single, each one presented in a John Bock designed artwork (and for those lucky enough to get one of the 50 special “Trouser-Editions”: each sewed in individual pieces of old trouser fabric.

And so the music. Bock and Aydo take the already broad-ranging world of Art Rock and stretch into psychedelia. But they’ve no intention of falling into the modern day bourgeoise trap of tidy, easily defined musical genres. Oh no, for theirs is a mission of focus and sobriety, and their ambitions are built on desire, lust, and teenage dreams.

Irritation too, as John Bock references Detroit rockers Kiss as his main inspiration for these Edition Fieber sessions. You might not spot this on first listen, but, honestly, who cares about comparisons? Seconds into the music you’ll be following the voice of John Bock as he opens chapters of books you shouldn’t definitely shouldn’t be fishing about in. These two figures are gonna get a bit clown-in-Steven-King’s-horror-classic “It” on you, particularly on „Toter im Kleckermatsch“ and „Kuhstall“.

The Bock/Abay words and music approach is a doorway for time travellers but is it the Parisian Grand Guignol theatre or a Herrschell Gordon Lewis American horror movie set that we’ve ended up in? It ends in the brutality of silence.

„Kuhstall“ also opens up with a bubbling, ghostly sound – the tonal equivalent of the Edgar Allen Poe or the opening scenes of a Vincent Price Hammer films production. Abay conjures these feelings with an inspiring mix of drone music and experimental metal eruptions, broken up into an endless stream of roaring sound, his route to the uncanny valley.

John Bock doesn’t trade in certainties. Brutality is happening, it is just a question of time – and then the victim will lay in front of us, fragmented and with eyes hanging loose, the legs and arms crisscrossed. This is the work of a real master of destruction. A butcher who carves with his „Diagrammhandschuh“ (what a fascinating word for a instrument of pain).