Zombocombo!

Clubbing is dead. Dance music is dead. That, at least is what everyone keeps telling us. However, saying that dance music is dead is rather like saying that eating bread is out of fashion. No matter what the media says, people are still going to want to dance. The fact that 90% of dance music being made at the moment sounds utterly dull, stilted and conservative just means that you’re going to have to look harder to discover the good stuff.

From where I’m standing this evening, clubbing looks anything but dead. I’m in a venue surrounded by people wearing wrestling costumes, including the DJ, who is standing in front of a huge screen on which amusing footage is being projected of American wrestling stars performing their neatly choreographed shows. Up on a specially constructed wrestling ring on the other side of the club, a boy with huge, pink, half-metre boxing gloves and a sequinned mask is pretending to fight a masked girl wearing a red bikini. The whole performance is being accompanied by the DJ, who is triggering samples of punches, kicks and screams. Suddenly, the girl in red reaches into her opponents pink lycra costume and pulls out a string of German ‘weiswurst’ sausages – substitute guts – and he collapses on the floor, fake blood pouring from his mouth. The referee, also in costume, begins throwing German pretzels at her, before he’s pushed out of the way by another two masked fighters who jump into the ring wearing suitably glittery costumes. Chaos ensues.

It hardly sounds like your average night in Regia. It certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that you’d see in upmarket clubs like Bamboo, where people would be far too concerned about getting fake blood on their pointy white shoes. In fact, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, either in Romania or elsewhere. Welcome to Zombocombo.

I’m here in the German city of Munich for the monthly club night, ‘Zombocombo’, the brainchild of DJ Mooner. Though you might not have heard of him, you’ll have definitely heard his music. His 2002 hit in the guise of the electro act ‘Zombie Nation’ managed to stay at the top of the charts all over Europe for what seemed like an eternity. And tonight, he’s spinning a suitably fashionably mixture of Italo-disco, punk-funk and electro, the soundtrack to tonight’s ‘Wrestling’ themed party.

The whole idea behind Zombocombo is to break away from the conservatism that has infected club culture over the past ten years. It’s less of a club night, more chaotic pantomime. “Each event has a theme,” Mooner tells me, “such as ‘Good Versus Evil’, ‘Beauty Contest’, or ‘Aerobics’. We had the Zombocombo one year birthday party recently, when we had a live band playing. One of our DJs, Polly, managed to play bass at the same time as lying down, pretending to give birth on stage, complete with blood, one-metre long forceps and a huge fake umbilical cord.” Their baby, another one of the DJs, appeared through a specially constructed box that she was lying on, wearing a skin-tight full-body baby suit, again specially made for the occasion.

The symbol of the Zombocombo event is their cement-mixer covered in tiny mirrors, a huge improvised rotating disco-ball. At every event people are invited to take part in the ‘Zombola’, with numbered balls being picked from inside the mixer in order to win all kinds of kitschy prizes.

What’s astonishing about Zombocombo is the lengths that they go to to put on a good show. The amount of extra props the event involves is staggering. Rather appropriately, our evening ends with mud wrestling in chocolate milk, with members of the audience being dragged into the improvised swimming pool in the middle of the dance floor. It’s no surprise that they describe their event as a ‘DIY artistic happening’. It’s closer to Marcel Duchamp than it is to the Ministry of Sound

Mooner, who actually performed in Romania just a few months ago, recently took the Zombocombo show to Poland as part of the ‘Elektropop Klub’, a cultural exchange between the two countries. He’s also trying at the moment to bring the show to Romania , having DJed at a number of events here just a few months ago. Here’s hoping that he gets here. Get your wrestling costumes at the ready…

 

© Tom Wilson / Business Magazin 2005