Europe Endless: Kraftwerk, Ernst and Annihilation

There's only a few words in this song but it seems to continually catch in my throat. There's something about it; a kind of dark magick not usually associated with Kraftwerk, who seem like fun chaps in the main.

It might be a UK thing... as idiots in our midst start trying to dissemble the very idea of Europe and union, you get the sense that dark, xenophobic over-reactions are just around the corner.

Max Ernst - Europe after the Rain

I'm always on a Max Ernst kick and this image seems somehow appropos. Europe after the rain. Europe after the reign. Empire's falling, new forms emerging.

As the synth squiggles and sheets rolled over and over and that uniquely Kraftwerk voice insisted, the images rolled with them so as soon as I shook one from my head the other came in. It was a very unsettling moment, uncanny in the psychotherapeutic sense - unheimlich, familiar yet oddly attenuated or repressed so that the meaning can only be glimpsed out of the corner of your minds eye...

I know how this sounds, even I had to check if I'd started self-medicating again (or maybe just turned into a pretentious arse) and you can listen to this yourself and probably see that I've entirely missed the mark here but this song sent me into an frame of mind that appeared simultaneously as a randomised brain glitch and an oddly precise insight.

I think this track predicts the future.

I think we're going to be swallowed because we don't want to communicate.

I think there's a terrible war coming right for us and there seems to be plenty of people who are waiting for it with open arms.

And mouths.