The European actionist and ritual-noise collective, and the label that carried it. Founded in Zurich in 1987 by Rudolf Eb.er, the connector-node between the Swiss, Japanese, German and American extremity tradition.
The Schimpfluch-Gruppe is the umbrella under which a circle of actionist and noise practitioners has worked since Rudolf Eb.er founded it in Zurich in 1987, and it is also the name of the label, Schimpfluch Associates, through which much of the circle's record output appeared. The Bureau files it at Tier II as a label and connector-node rather than as a band, because Schimpfluch is not a discrete recording act: it is an affiliation, a loose and shifting constellation around a fixed core, and an imprint. Its members' own projects are filed separately, and this entry documents the thing that holds them together.
The core is Eb.er, who ran Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck in parallel; Joke Lanz, whose Sudden Infant is filed in its own right; and Dave Phillips, the Zurich sound activist who came to the circle from the hardcore scene. Around them the line-up shifted by occasion, taking in Marc Zeier's G*Park, later Daniel Löwenbrück, and guests from the larger noise world, among them Junko of Hijokaidan. Schimpfluch is best understood as this network rather than as any one of its line-ups.
What the group does is set out in Eb.er's own term: "psycho-physical tests and trainings." The work runs to abreaction plays, confrontational radio broadcasts, physically demanding live actions, and a recorded practice drawn from musique concrète and bruitism. It is directed at the body and the senses as much as at the ear, and it is deliberately extreme: the actions are confrontational, the staging shocking, the aim a kind of radical clearing-out. The Bureau documents the method and its place in the tradition; in keeping with how the archive handles the scene's most provocative material, it names the difficult-legacy character of the work as such and supplies no gratuitous detail.
The lineage matters, and the group wears it openly. Zurich is the city where Dada was born at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, whose bruitist performances incited audience riots, and Schimpfluch claims that inheritance directly. The other half of the lineage is Viennese Actionism, the 1960s body-art tradition the archive files alongside Hermann Nitsch. Schimpfluch threads both through the noise practice, which is why the Bureau files it as the actionist wing of the form rather than as a straightforward noise act.
The label is the practical side of all this. Schimpfluch Associates was, in Eb.er's phrase, "a label and home for like-minded entities" · small-edition cassette, CD and LP, much of it long out of print. The records also appeared on collaborator labels, Tochnit Aleph, RRRecords, Hanson Records and others across the European specialist network, which is part of why the Bureau files Schimpfluch as a connector-node: it is one of the points through which the Swiss, German, American and Japanese extremity scenes are tied together. The 2012 Extreme Rituals carnival in Bristol, a three-day retrospective, is the documented account of that reach.
Where it sits: a label and collective filed at Labels, not a band; the European actionist wing of the noise tradition; the bridge between the Japanese extremity of Merzbow and Hijokaidan, the body-art of Hermann Nitsch, and the power-electronics wing of the British scene. For the music itself, the archive points to the member-project files; this entry is the map of the network they belong to.