Audio By Carbonatix
Lately, Respectable Street’s seemed to turn into a last haven for darker subcultures in South Florida. It hosts a monthly steampunk social and continues, in recent weeks, to book both, um, old-wave bands (Gene Loves Jezebel) as well as newer, angrier, and more electronic acts (Die/Vision). Falling into the latter camp are Saturday’s stars, Funker Vogt, who, OK, aren’t that new. The band has been together since the mid-1990s and is the forerunner of a microgenre sometimes called “aggro-tech” (sigh). The members of the group (a shifting number of about four to six) all hail from small-town Germany, and their outlook and sound is über-Teutonic. Their lyrics can tend toward the nihilistic and detached, the music itself built upon the very Kraftwerkian notion of sounding as machine-produced as possible. The BPM remains high, the overall aesthetic vaguely militaristic. This is either terrifying, thrilling, or just more sound and fury — your own personal sensibilities will determine which.
