Swiss actionism committed to a record. Piano and violin set against Dada-noise, cut-ups and silence. The album most people meet Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck through, and the one they find hardest to finish.
Asshole / Snail Dilemma is the central record of Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, the main project of the Swiss actionist Rudolf Eb.er and the most-cited piece of work in the Schimpfluch world. It first appeared on CD in 2000 on the Berlin label Tochnit Aleph (TA025); a vinyl edition followed in 2010 (TA025-10), slightly re-edited by Eb.er to fit the side lengths and pressed in 500 copies. The record gathers studio work and recordings of live actions into one object, and treats that object, not any single performance, as the finished piece.
The method is the Schimpfluch method. Eb.er works from actionism, the body-and-event tradition that runs back through the Viennese actionists, rather than from any rock or electronic lineage; the screaming that fills much of the album is closer to scream therapy than to vocal performance, a release worked through rather than a style worn. Around the voice he sets piano and violin, Dada-noise, tape cut-ups and long stretches of silence, so that the record swings between near-nothing and sudden assault. The structure is built on that swing: the silences are part of the composition, used to leave the listener with no footing before the next event.
Side A is given over to the live action For Stringquintet and Asstrumpet, held across the whole side. Side B is a collage of studio recordings and further actions, among them For Girlsneck and Sawblade, For Disarranged Leg / Arm Prothesis and For Piano & Shotgun, the titles themselves carrying the deadpan and the threat of the work in equal measure. Eb.er is the sole author and director throughout, mastering the original at Obscure Corrective in Tokyo; the 2010 vinyl was cut by Lupo at D&M in Berlin, its runouts etched "YOU THINK THIS IS A JOKE?" and "CHURCH OF RUDOLF", which is about the right register for the whole thing.
The guests are drawn from the Schimpfluch circle and its Japanese connections. Maso Yamazaki, the Osaka noise figure better known as Masonna, takes a co-actionist role; Dave Phillips of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe and Wataru Saga supply further audio; Kaori Yakushinji appears as actress. The Japanese link is not incidental: Eb.er spent years working out of Japan, and the album lies at the meeting point of European actionism and the Osaka noise underground that Masonna belongs to.
Its reputation is double-edged. Listeners describe it as an acoustic torture and, at the same time, as the record that opened noise up for them; more than one account calls it the most confrontational thing in the catalogue while also, oddly, the most approachable way in. The Bureau treats both as true. The piano-and-violin passages give the record a strange, personal calm that the screaming and the actions then break open, and that contrast is what has kept it the album people reach for first when they reach for Schimpfluch at all.
Where it sits: the central Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck statement on record; the clearest single demonstration that actionism can be held inside a structured album rather than only in live body-work; continuous with the Dada and cut-up lineage on one side and with musique concrète's treatment of the recorded object on the other; and the meeting point of Swiss actionism and the Osaka noise scene. It is filed not as easy listening, which it is plainly not, but as the record the rest of the Schimpfluch work is most often read against.
Editorial note · the work is confrontational actionism, screaming and recorded live-action among its materials. The Bureau files it as a document and describes it plainly; the description is not a recommendation to any particular listener.