Electric Würms ‘Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk’

Words by Russell Carstens

Electric Würms is a collaboration between Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips and the experimental/psychedelic Nashville band Linear Downfall. Coyne has taken over bass duties while Drozd plays guitar and provides something vaguely resembling vocals. Their debut EP Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk, is a must for fans of the Butthole Surfers and John Frusciante’s recent experiments in schizophrenic electronic music. With that said, let’s prepare for liftoff, shall we?

On “I Could Only See Clouds,” an ancient tribe seems to have gotten their hands on Aphex Twin’s sample library. Drozd has somehow joined them via time travel, and his vocals create a pillow-like silky sheen on top, sounding a bit like those on select Gorillaz songs outside the hip-hop realm.

“Futuristic Hallucination” opens with what sounds like a deranged clock tower that has come to life in an old Frankenstein movie. Essentially an understated instrumental, this visual piece of music lives up to its title…even under sober listening circumstances.

The AM-radio vocals of “The Bat” were most likely beamed in from a space station or an alien civilization living light years away. A tensely compressed drum machine and fat bass synth dominate “The Second Time,” whose unchanging rhythm becomes hypnotic to the point where the listener is left feeling as if they’ve been running on a hamster wheel under the observance of malevolent aliens.

More of an energetic jam (with its melodic basslines), “Transform” is the closest thing on the EP to a rock song. I believe at this point that the Würms crash landed in an empty desert, took peyote, and had a jam session with the help of generators. The gentle phase guitar on the Yes cover, “Heart of the Sunrise” hovers over docile drums for a pleasant welcoming back to somewhat normal civilization.

It’s easy to see that Electric Würms weren’t trying to be weird for the sake of it, but they wrote this music out of a true fondness for experimental sounds. Don’t bother trying to label it, just enjoy it for what it is—awesome.