F.S.K.

F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) is an art school band from Munich that formed in 1980 in the editorial office of the underground magazine Mode & Verzweiflung and issued disturbing slogans of a new dissidence like: Wir sagen Ja zur modernen Welt (we say yes to the modern world) and Heute Disco, morgen Umsturz, übermorgen Landpartie (disco today, coup tomorrow, a country outing the day after). The Italian Futurists’ idea to flood Venice was joyfully appealing to them so they made the serious demand to convert theaters into parking garages (Theater zu Parkhäusern). The futuristic development of so-called noisemakers (a productive modification of the sounds of industrialized cities as well as the completely new war machines of World War I) carried a key moment of deviant pop music into its emerging discourse: clipping, distortion, Bring the Noise.
The hedonistic partisanship of the band F.S.K. particularly affected its eclectic zigzags (from post punk to rhythm & blues, country & western to techno soul) and morphed into yet another new, postmodern shape in the 1980s in England (where John Peel was a prominent promoter of F.S.K.) and in the 1990s in the US, where their music faced the transatlantic feedback of the songs of American occupying forces. Back in Germany their music took on more abstract forms that were described as Cubist with the latest album Akt, eine Treppe hinabsteigend (nude descending a staircase): aesthetic lines that move from Luigi Russolo and Iannis Xenakis, Sun Ra and Larry Heard to the glitches of the latest bass music. In the traditional lineup of a rock and roll band, today F.S.K. musically executes all of these threads.
The band still consists of the four founding members Justin Hoffmann, Thomas Meinecke, Michaela Melián and Wilfried Petzi. Carl Oesterhelt joined them in 1991.