Knorkator

Knorkator
Stumpen, Buzz Dee, Alf Ator (from left)
Background information
Origin	Berlin, Germany
Genres	Rock music
Years active	1994–present
Labels	Tubareckorz, Nuclear Blast Records
Website	http://www.knorkator.de/
Members
Stumpen (Gero Ivers) (voc) Buzz Dee (Sebastian Baur) (guit) Alf Ator (Alexander Thomas) (voc, keys) Nick Aragua (Nicolaj Gogow) (dr) Rajko Gohlke (bass)
Past members
Kirk Thiele (guit) Chrish Chrash (dr) Tim Buktu (Tim Schallenberg) (bass)

Knorkator is a German band from Berlin that combines heavy metal with comical elements. They proclaim themselves to be "Germany's most band in the world" (German: "Deutschlands meiste Band der Welt"), as the title "The best band in the world" was already taken by Die Ärzte. The band was founded in 1994, but only played in the Berlin/Brandenburg area until 1998.

Knorkator gained further fame (and some notoriety) in 2000 with their performance of Ick wer zun Schwein (sic; literally, in Berlin dialect, "I'm turning into a pig") in the German national qualification for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Knorkator announced the end of the band in a MySpace bulletin on June 14, 2008, the last concert was played on December 5 that year in Berlin. The official reason given for the band's breakup was that Alf Ator wanted to leave Germany to start a new life in Thailand. In autumn 2010 a bulletin by Stumpen announced the bands' reunion. A first "small" tour followed in April 2011 as well as some concerts at well-known festivals like Wacken Open Air. The tour was called the "77 minutes tour", as the setlist was planned to be exactly 77 minutes long. A digital clock that counted down the minutes was placed on stage to make sure the time limit was not exceeded. Their new album "Es werde Nicht" (translates to "Let there be Nothing") will be released in September 2011, followed by a big tour with concerts of regular length.

Style

Knorkator's music can be largely classified as industrial metal, somewhat akin to White Zombie and Ministry. Knorkator, however, strongly features a comedic element. Most songs escalate into falsetto vocals and bombastic, over-the-top anthemic choruses, with crushing guitars and subtle samplers. Due to the amusing message, however, the band's considerable technical and artistic merit is sometimes overlooked.

Knorkator's lyrics are somewhat explicit, but always very humorous:

• "Ich lass mich klonen" ("I'll have myself cloned") deals with the advantages of cloning oneself, hence sparing the effort of masturbation
• "VIVA Buzz Dee" is a worship-anthem towards guitarist Buzz Dee
• "Wie weit ist es bis zum Horizont" ("How far to the horizon") wonders about the metaphor of the distance to the horizon, but continues to calculate it with equations
• "Komm wieder her" ("Come back") begins as a lament to a lost love, but later its hinted that the singer only abused this partner to do the chores.
• "Weg nach unten" ("The way down") describes a depressed person digging himself into the earth; what appears to be metaphorical at first is in the end revealed to be meant literally: "Dann kommt Licht und ein Känguruh, und ich weiß ich bin zu weit" ("Then there's light and a kangaroo, and I know I've gone too far")
• "Nur mal Angenommen" ("Just in case") is a monologue inside the singer's head, where he wonders what would happen if he was flexible enough to stick his head up into his anus. The main question he deals with is "Where would I come out?"
• The aptly named "A" only contains the lyrics "A / A / A / A", which are in fact four choruses of a lengthy distorted scream.
• "Aeger sum" ("I am ill") sounds like an ecclesiastic or gregorian choral in Latin, but if one translates the lyrics its basically an enumeration of technical terms of illnesses, taken from a medical dictionary.
• [Buchstabe] ("Letter"; properly titled with a novel letter), in which a "doctor of [German] philology" presents the results of his 13 years of research: a letter for the bilabial trill to add to the German alphabet.

Most of Knorkator's lyrics are in German; however, some songs also feature English ("beating around the bush", "Ma Baker", etc.), Thai ("Mai khao djai", "Khid tyng baan"), Latin ("Aeger sum"), or French ("Ma belle fêmme", "Franz Hose") lyrics – these songs are often extreme covers of previously well-known hit songs.

Live performances

Knorkator's wild stage shows and appearance are analogously chaotic: half of Stumpen's body is tattooed black, and he usually performs in his goofy underpants; Buzz Dee's appearance is often cited as being a clone of "Big" Jim Martin.

Knorkator are (in)famous for their wild stage shows. Alf Ator has been known to hit the audience with a large foam club, throw toast slices and wet autumn foliage at the crowd. Sometimes a modified shredder was used to distribute shredded vegetables and fruit over the crowd, which was announced as "vegetarian airway-catering". Their live performances are also well known for extensive acts of instrument destruction where especially keyboarder Alf Ator used to deconstruct one or more electric organs that he had been playing on with a toilet brush or similar before. Singer Stumpen is known for the frequent smashing of TV sets on stage, from which he suffered a glass splinter getting stuck in his thigh that had to be removed by surgery some years later and was then auctioned on the internet. In earlier shows, a lot of furniture pieces were placed on the stage which were then destroyed during the show by Alf or Stumpen, mostly with an axe or a baseball bat. Stumpen is also known for wearing almost nothing on stage except for a woman's bathing suit or underpants.

Crowd surfing is another important element of Knorkator's shows, not only performed by the musicians themselves, but also directing the crowd to perform exceptional exercises, such as racing duels between spectators over the hands of the crowd, piggyback moshing, instructing the crowd to separate and then run into each other (known as the Wall of Death), or lifting and surfing the heavily overweight sound engineer from the mixing desk to the stage and back.

Origin of the name

The name "Knorkator" is, so it is generally assumed, derived from "knorke", a word used in Berlin and the Ruhr basin meaning "great" or "fabulous" that has, however, fallen into disuse and is somewhat dated (similar to the English slang word "swell"). The suffix -ator alludes to the endings of powerful and muscular superheroes like "terminator", "gladiator", "predator", etc. Thus an appropriate translation would be "Swellinator". As Knorkator state: "We wanted to become the best and finest music superheroes" (German: „Wir wollten also die besten und tollsten Musiksupermänner werden.“ – „Tarebuch“, January 15, 2006).

Members

• Stumpen – vocals
• Buzz Dee – guitar
• Alf Ator – vocals, keyboards, songwriting, arrangement
• Nick Aragua – drums
• Rajko Gohlke – bass

Former members

• Kirk Thiele – guitar
• Chrish Chrash – drums
• Tim Buktu – bass

CD

• 1997 The Schlechtst of Knorkator
• 1999 Hasenchartbreaker
• 2000 Tribute to uns selbst
• 2002 High Mud Leader
• 2003 Ich hasse Musik
• 2007 Das nächste Album aller Zeiten
• 2010 Knorkator – Mein Leben Als Single (3 CD-Box Ltd. Ed.)
• 2011 Es werde Nicht

DVD

• 2005 Zu alt
• 2008 Weg nach unten

Singles / EP

• 1995 A
• 1998 Böse
• 1999 Weg nach unten
• 1999 Buchstabe
• 2000 Ick wer zun Schwein
• 2000 Ich lass mich klonen
• 2000 Komm wieder her
• 2003 Der ultimative Mann
• 2006 Wir werden
• 2007 Alter Mann
• 2007 www.einliebeslied.com
• 2008 Kinderlied

DVD

• Zu alt, DVD (November 11, 2005)
• Weg nach unten, DVD (September 19, 2008)

Literature

• Knorkator: Des Wurzels Zweig. Berlin: Eulenspiegel, 2002. ISBN 3-359-01448-0.
• Knorkator: Am Anfang war das Am. Berlin: Eulenspiegel, 2004. ISBN 3-359-01609-2.
• Knorkator: Alf Ator – Die satanischen Achillesferse. Berlin: Eulenspiegel, 2008. ISBN 3359022009.

External links

• Official site