The EP Malaria! (Marat, 1981) introduced a duo of Berlin-based
female experimental composers.
Gudrun Gut (already a co-founder of
Einsturzende Neubauten) and saxophonist Bettina Koester,
both formerly in
the all-girls-band Mania D,
took inspiration from Brecht's theater and from free jazz to desecrate rock music.
The didactic recitation and the solo improvisations are in fact the attractions of songs that would otherwise sound monotonous. The ramshackle fanfare over a childish tribalism of Laufen and the shrill strumming to a Native-American rhythm of I Will Be Your Only One are about the most musical things the two manage to produce, though always with a weary and decadent attitude. These were followed by the singles How Do You Like My New Dog? (Les Disques du Crpuscule) and New York Passage, and the EP Weisses Wasser (1982). On the latter, the frenzied pow-wow of Kaltes Klares Wasser draws on ideas from the early Talking Heads and merges them with a Velvet Undergroundstyle threnody.
Emotion (Crpuscule, 1982) improved communication considerably. The group had grown to five members (all women) and displayed greater creativity in the rhythmic department, up to the driving disco music of Geld and the syncopated waltz of Macht. The idea was still to make music that was didactic before being artistic, but this time the gloomy apathy of Einsam and the free-jazz noise of Desire mattered more than the singers proclamations.
The group disbanded after Beat the Distance (Rebel).
Revisited (ROIR, 1983) contains live recordings of 1982.
Compiled 1981-1984 (Moabit, 1991) is an anthology.
Koester moved to New York in 1983 to work in cinema.
The band reunited for Kaltes Klares Wasser (1991), Elation (1992) and Cheerio (Moabit, 1993).
Gut released her first solo album, I Put a Record On (2007),
followed by
Baustelle (2010), a collaboration with AGF credited to Greie Gut Fraktion,
Wildlife (2012),
500m (2012), a collaboration with Jochen Irmler,
Instrumentals For Sirens (2017), a collaboration with Beate Bartel (who used to be in Mania D),
and
Moment (2018).
Koester released the solo albums
Autonervous (2006), a collaboration
with San Francisco-based saxophonist and singer Jessie Evans,
Queen of Noise (2009), titled after her nickname, and
Kolonel Silvertop (2017).
She then retired to southern Italy (near Salerno).
The Painter (JUBG, 2022) contains the soundtrack of Oliver Hirschbiegel's film composed by Gudrun Gut. Her music for a TV miniseries is collected on
Gut Soundtrack (2024).
Bettina Koester died in 2026.
