Sudden Infant is Joke Lanz's vehicle within the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, and the Bureau files it at Tier II as a central project of that actionist-noise lineage and of the international noise scene. Founded around 1989, it makes physical sound poetry and epileptic noise bursts from contact microphones, tapes and turntables, rooted in Viennese Actionism, Dada and body art. It meets the centrality test through Lanz's place in the Schimpfluch core and the documentary test as a name the actionist wing of noise routes through.
The Schimpfluch lineage is the context. The Schimpfluch-Gruppe, founded in Zürich in 1986–1987 by Rudolf Eb.er, became the epitome of radical outsider art, threading the historic avant-garde, Dada and the extremity of Viennese Actionism through the performance-based precursors of industrial music to arrive at a blend of noise assault, gestural precision and primal physicality. Lanz was a core member alongside Eb.er, Dave Phillips and Marc Zeier, working under many names that were, as he put it, basically always the same people, and Sudden Infant is the name under which he pursued his own strand of that work.
The method is physical above all. Lanz builds his noise from the body, contact microphones picking up the sounds of skin and breath and movement, loops and tapes and turntables assembled into what The Wire called work in the border zones where performance and body art meet improvisation and noise. The live actions are the heart of it: epileptic, confrontational, gesturally precise, closer to Actionist performance than to a conventional concert. This is noise as a bodily art, not an electronic one.
The debut LP Radiorgasm (1991) appeared on the Schimpfluch label run by Eb.er, carrying a manifesto-like text on its back cover and featuring Lanz with B. Lingg, Inzekt and Dave Phillips. It is a classic Schimpfluch noise drama, and it set the template for a vast catalogue across labels including Tochnit Aleph, Blossoming Noise and Harbinger Sound. In later years Lanz reconfigured Sudden Infant as a punk-inflected noise-rock trio, and albums such as Buddhist Nihilism (2018) and Lunatic Asylum set the absurdist body-noise sensibility into a contorted rock format without losing its unpredictability.
Lanz is also a hub. He has performed and recorded with Christian Marclay, Z'EV, Daniel Menche, The New Blockaders, GX Jupitter-Larsen and many others, and his turntablism connects the noise scene to free improvisation. That breadth of collaboration is part of why Sudden Infant reads as central rather than marginal within its world.
The Bureau's reading. Sudden Infant is filed at Tier II as a core Schimpfluch project and a central act of actionist noise. Its contribution is a physical, body-based noise rooted in Viennese Actionism and Dada, realised in confrontational live actions and a vast catalogue, and latterly in a noise-rock trio. It is cross-referenced to Joke Lanz and the Schimpfluch circle, and read here as the body-art wing of the noise tradition.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · last revised c. the Holocene