Asylum Lunaticum
Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bar
$12.99
Intimate, absurd, feral and aggressive in its homemade weirdness, the music of Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bar has been a well-kept secret for too long. Hjuler & Bar 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 & Mama Bar 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 Bar 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 Wiese, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Brume, and Af Ursin, among many others.
praise from Asylum Lunaticum:
One of the Top 15 albums of the year in outsider music, 2009 – The Wire Magazine
“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.)
“(Asylum Lunaticum) must be the weirdest thing that’s come my way this year… I can’t for the life of me explain why I love it so much. Treat yourself to a copy and see if you feel the same way. – Paris Transatlantic
“An unfathomably bizarre collection of voices and field recordings… I shall need to return to this loopy disc!” – The Sound Projector
“To call this compilation bizarre does a disservice to the word…” – Brainwashed.com
“… what this CD gives us (are) the contours of Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Bär, and the wealth of their startling, shocking and humorous ideas.” – Dusted Magazine
I think its fair to say that Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär are outsiders. They don’t belong to any school or genre of music, but create a sort of sound poetry of their own. – Vital Weekly
