Kreator - At The Pulse of Kapitulation DVD
May 12 2008 at 03:06:58 AM
On March 4, 1990, four months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first large-scale Heavy Metal concert in East Berlin was held at the Werner Seelenbinder Halle. For many, the night marked their first true concert experience as the well-known but never-before-seen European Speed Metal bands Tankard, Sabbat (UK), Coroner and Kreator performed in front of an estimated 7,000 fans. After 28 years, people finally had the freedom to “go wild.”
Originally released on a rare VHS in 1990 as
Live in East Berlin, Kreator’s landmark performance has now been re-mixed and re-edited for a deluxe CD/DVD package with various and uneven selection bonus materials. The set was produced by Niels Folta, Andy Sneap, and vocalist/guitarist Mille Petrozza, who writes fondly in the accompanying press material that: “Words don’t do justice to the energy that was in the air that day…”
Unfortunately, without arguing against the groundbreaking implications of the show itself, I can say that not only words, but also the very images themselves somehow fail to capture the greater sense of things.
Performing in support of their fourth record,
Extreme Aggression, Kreator’s setlist unveils few surprises and, while received well by all in attendance, the show hardly comes off as the stuff of legend. The whole marketing of the release (aside from being a way to make money even while the band is writing their next album) is based on ignoring the obvious. For it’s not necessarily how Kreator performed, but that they were there in the first place, that’s important.
Most of the songs here have been released in multiple formats and more lively performances since. Aside from Frank Blackfire’s usual and mostly gross stage antics, the group’s presence is uniformly static with all the songs played a click slower than on record. Even Ventor Riel’s drum solo is nearly all bass peddling and playing-up to the crowd. I know they can do better than this.
While certainly an improvement in production compared to the first release, the Formica-table thumping drum sound and cloudy video are far from optimum quality and the actual show is hard to appreciate out of context.
Despite the massive amount of re-editing, mostly in the form of constantly recycled jump cuts to the same two or three fans along with a cheesy black and white filter intermittently used to make the show look like a roll of shaky film stock, there’s no real introduction or hint as to what made the show special. We never actually see a full view of the audience from the stage till the final two tracks, “Awakening of the Gods “ and “Tormentor.” After which the band shakes some hands and says good night. The screen then fades to black as feedback drowns out the crowd.
Fortunately,
The Past and Now, a separate yet all too brief retrospective included on the DVD, adds to and even outshines much of the main concert footage. Containing interviews with Götz Kuehnemund (
Metal Hammer), radio DJs Jens Molle and Jakob Kranz as well as excerpts of vintage interviews with the show’s promoter, Peter Schramm, various crewman, security guards and others involved with planning and setting up the show, the small feature elaborates on the obstacles facing Metal fans before the wall came down and what the concert and specifically, Kreator meant to them at the time. Strangely there are no on-camera interviews with the band today regarding the show. Not so strangely, no footage of the other groups’ performances surface in the footage. But the story itself is remarkable.
Compared to punks, metalheads were viewed as more of an anomaly to the local authorities, which were unable to grasp the meaning and intentions of the music and martial/macabre artwork. For fans, however, the meaning was clear, and many young heshers embraced Metal and clearly left-wing groups like Kreator as a way to distance themselves from the state and official policy. Through traders, black-market bootleggers, amateur designers, fanzines and radio, fans inside East Berlin proved dedicated to creating a strong underground of Metal fanatics.
Hard to imagine any place in Europe today where it would be next-to impossible to find LPs, official t-shirts and magazines, but in 1989, one had to work, dig and most importantly, wait to hear the latest album.
While fans in Eastern Germany could still listen to LPs on the radio, the sides were sometimes aired weeks apart from each other. They could read
Metal Hammer, but only through photocopies of the magazine sold page-by-page. Seeing those same bands in the magazine perform live was definitely not an option. The best you could hope for, according to a grizzly, tattooed and burly member of the security team that night named Pille, was to hear a cover of Metallica or Slayer by a local GDR band. Even Andy Sneap, who played with Sabbat that night, could not, at 19 years old, fully grasp the implications of the wall coming down. Before then, there were no outsiders and even after November, the future still remained uncertain.
Although ending with Kuehnemund giving the obligatory high-marks for Kreator’s latest efforts in an obviously prepared sendoff, much of the piece’s material is not actually about the band, but life in East Berlin and the build up to the show; including footage of the setting up and aftermath at the hall. All of which could have been put to even greater use to introduce and be inter-cut with the concert feature, which opens only with a black screen as the announcer introduces the band offscreen.
The inclusion of
Hallucination Comas (1991), a series of silent-expressionist shorts mixed in with music videos for
Coma of Souls, is a throwaway bonus that nobody but director and noted painter/cover artist Andreas Marschall has probably - or would even want to have seen more than once. The “deleted scenes that censors couldn’t stomach” involve a giallo style murder and dismemberment that makes you think West Germans were even more uptight than the rest of the country.
In some ways inspiring although far less entertaining than Steamhammer’s previous release of Sodom’s
Lords of Depravity DVD,
At The Pulse of Kapitulation is worth checking out more as curiosity than full the “lesson in thrash history” its advertised to be. With so much more left to show and tell, it’s disappointing that a full overview of the concert with performances and commentary by the other bands will likely never be released.
Worth a rental but not the
teuer retail price.
[Todd DePalma]
Setlist:
Some Pain Will Last
Extreme Aggression
Under the Guillotine
Toxic Trace
Bringer of Torture
Pleasure to Kill
Flag of Hate
Drum Solo
Terrible Certainty
Riot of Violence
Love Us or Hate Us
Behind the Mirror
Betrayer
Awakening of the Gods
Tormentor
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