The work begins with an absence. Somewhere between Biedermeier House and deep dada. The dance hall is empty, the lights are still running, a white deer expressing himself. Meidling Discotheque, the new joint work by Graf Hadik and Erdem Tunakan, negotiates the space between memory and operation, between what a city promises and what remains of it - an inborn error strategy.
Graf Hadik, known in Vienna as Weisser Hirsch, develops a language here that refuses to explain itself. The texts operate in the register of the incidental: measuring blood pressure, bones, asphalt, grooves. These are not metaphors, or they are so self-evidently metaphors that the difference has stopped mattering. Das willst du nicht wissen / das willst du nicht sehen ("you don't want to know / you don't want to see") is a poetics of averted attention that nonetheless registers everything.
Erdem Tunakan provides a rhythmic frame that adapts to this laconism: a lazy funk that names its own condition without apologising for it. Charles Aznavour turns up. Cleopatra's Needle watches. Uncle Pavian calls about a gold chain. The references are widely scattered and still precise. This isn't eclecticism. It's a particular worldliness that has chosen Vienna's 12th district as its centre of gravity.
The format, a 10-inch Phonocut direct cut, is programmatic. No digital intermediate stage, no correction after the fact. What was played is what gets pressed. The groove is the sole authority.
Meidling Discotheque is a document of carrying on. Not in spite of anything. Just carrying on.
