ZEITKRATZER CD

You may or may not be familiar with my obsessive attention to particular detail. A pedantry that verges on the pathological at times, and a direct and regular cause of an often bad case of insomnia. Just as a girl knows stocking seams not regimentally straight right up to the mandatory keyholes will earn her a deservedly sound thrashing, for me the thought of leaving even the tiniest orthographical error is mortifying.

In fact, on two separate occasions now, at vast personal expense, entire Susan Lawly CD booklet runs each had to be recalled and reprinted owing to a single ridiculously minor typo; always for the simple reason that, even if not a single person ever noticed, I couldn't comfortably live with myself knowing they were thus flawed.

And thus my heart sank when the new Zeitkratzer Whitehouse CDs arrived. Already bewildered by the band's bizarre choice of cover illustration, like a rabid proofreader, I came upon not only flagrantly insignificant punctuation and spelling mistakes in the booklet's accompanying text's English translation, but also factual errors. Oh, and a font that looks suspiciously like the dreaded Helvetica. Damn.

Despite all that, and some rather indiscreet revelations from our preparatory conversations on his part, ZK's genial main man Reinhold Friedl writes a lot of very kind things in the text, for which I'm grateful; and it has to be said what counts most, the music itself, sounds fantastic, clear and abrasive. It was, I repeat, an amazingly pleasurable experience to work with such incredibly talented musicians there in Marseille; this release is a great testament to their brilliant and thrilling performance.

I'll send a complimentary copy of the album to the first person who correctly identifies the original albums of the songs Nzambi Ia Lufua and Scapegoat in the comments section.