Hjuler, Kommissar & Mama Bar

Asylum Lunaticum

Label: Intransitive Recordings Country: USA

"Intimate, absurd, feral and aggressive in its homemade weirdness, the music of Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär has been a well-kept secret for too long. Hjuler & Bär have self-published their dada-esque sound poetry experiments on small-edition lathe-cut LPs, tapes, and CDRs for years, usually adorning them with elaborate junk sculptures and profane paintings. Intransitive is proud to collect their best recordings so far onto a single, widely available CD so that anyone can hear the music without making a major financial investment.

The husband and wife duo uses deceptively simple means - typically just their voices, a cassette-tape recorder and a microphone - to create astonishing suburban dramas that are somehow both sweetly charming and staggeringly psychotic, sometimes simultaneously. Join Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Bär as they perform acts of banal heroics, like exploring the basement... taking their son for a bicycle ride... walking with a red shirt into a field of cattle... or pondering reforms made to the Danish police system.

Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär are painters, sculptors, film-makers, and musicians based in Flensberg, Germany, near the Danish border. Their artwork has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals around the world. They collaborated with like-minded artists such as Thurston Moore, Arnulf Meifert, John Weise, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Jan Iwers, and Af Ursin, among many others.

"Asylum Lunaticum is not just another name or title, it's an almost too harmless a description of the family Hjuler/Bar. Over decades, Kommisar Hjuler provided me with his sick but mind-blowing art. So rare their works are, it's truly time to dig 'em out and show the world! This CD shall do so."-Rudolf Eb.er (R&G/Schimpfluch-Commune Int.)