Inade portrait in e|i-Magazine #5 Fall 2005

by David Cotner

Inade hold sway over portions of the new lands now mainly deserted by groups like Zero Kama, Psychic TV, and Metgumbnerbone: ritualistic experimental music oft-confused with ambience. Ambience - a situation of complementing - is not the aim of such Inade recordings as "Through the Gates of Death" and "The Crushing of Earthly Foundations". Formed in the early 1990s by Knut Enderlein and René Lehmann in Aue in the Erzgebirge (the Ore Mountains of Saxony, Germany), they've issued more than a dozen recordings and appeared on double that many compilations. Each release, from the earliest cassettes in 1992 to their gorgeously-colored Drone Records releases like "The Axxiarm Plains" (1994) and the latest quadruple LP box-set retrospective "Colliding Dimensions" on their own Loki Foundation label (celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2006), indicates a codifying of their worldview - smoothing out rough edges as worked through the sounds on the records. Inade's sound - droning, rhythmic, miasmic - is shaped by their affinity for philosophies of total focus (Majakowski, Ernst Jünger); it's as if the philosopher were in front of them, summoned from the great beyond through their music and held fast so that Inade could finally engage in dialogue with them about the world as it is and could be. In this way, they wear their hearts on their sleeves and, of the groups that came out around the same time as they did and work in the same field (Predominance, Turbund Sturmwerk), Inade are the most outwardly searching, without settling on one clear path. While this searching may seem at times anything from angry flailing and despair (cf. their "The Crackling of the Anonymous" CD on Loki Foundation) to archly esoteric (i.e. the "Peryt Shou" 12" LP box-set collaboration with Turbund Sturmwerk), it's pursued with sobriety and propriety, as though one gifted a thighbone flute refused to play it until he knew everything he could about the person from which it were taken.

back to top