Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet took a detour from their recent appearance at NYC's No Fun Fest to perform live in New Jersey on Bill Zurat's show. Here's how Bill describes the band: Imagine a post-apocalyptic nightmare world where mutated Hans Christian Andersen characters play noisy synthesizers stretched through an assortment of brain-bleeding sound effects and oscillators and you'll be halfway to a good description to the sound of Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet. This San Francisco outfit has released their new album HAPPY AS PITCH (available on the CIP label) following the two stunning albums that devastated these airwaves last year. Lucky for us, Hans has Gretel and Johan Livingston Grüsel lending a hand during the performance. Be prepared for a rare opportunity to hear these Teutonic hellions twist your unadulterated synapses:

One look at photos of HGK should indicate that a radio performance does not quite capture the unique quality of the band's performance antics in their entirety. Luckily, volunteer Phil Catalano was around with a video camera.

Download the video of "Tea For Two" (mpg, 55 MB) and see why tap dancing is the new black at WFMU.

Hans Grusel's "sound" might best be described as the sounds of a Bavarian music box designed by an artist who had been bonked on the head with a brass cuckoo clock chime and left in a dark room for three years with only the music of Scriabin, Wagner, and Prokofiev mixed with off-speed 1960s sci-fi soundtracks and folkloric anthems pumping through the slightly clogged vents. HGKK audio combines numerous divergent elements---rigid structures and sweeping washes of plucky improvisation; classic violin sounds twisting in a mobius strip of clashing yet beautiful sounds and tones; flitting marches and delicate traipsing at the bottom of the sea---to create dense and blissful audio rainstorms.

"My #1 vote for hardest to pronounce"

"If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live in a gingerbread house in a German town filled with creatures cohabitating as cantankerous cuckoo clocks, then you should pay a visit to Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet."

"... Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet, a jaunty, brightly lit entry into the powerful electro-noise genre. Hans Grüsel's carnival pieces make for surprisingly pleasant, hyperactive joke's-on-you listening, with a couple of sections that are flat-out fun."

"A fairy tale of unpredictable sounds, humorous costumes, and performance short enough you only ask for more. Du grand theatre!"

"In Hans Grüsel's world, creepy organ requiems occasionally surface beneath electronic noise in a portrait of circuit-driven madness deep in the black forest."

"What is unleashed after the cuckoo clock strikes is something that's hard to describe, but maybe sensory overload and confuse-o-rama noise comes pretty close. There are so many elements here that are fused together in a beautiful din. There are scary monster music paired with cartoon orchestration. Bleepity-bleep gibber-jabber with a crazed oompah bans vibe, and straight-up electronic mayhem that sorta wrecked my ears with its elegant chaos. If you have a chance to see Hans and his Kränkenkabinet in a live venue, you'll get a better picture … the stage show features big painted sets and all the group members clad in kooky and demented Oktoberfestival gear."

"The random-sounding lunacy eventually gives way to a masterminded hypnotic lull."

"Local wizards of sound artistry Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet are plenty entertaining on their own – their freaky-deaky electronic tunes are perfect party music for sweet-toothed witches, cuckoo clocks, animatronic dolls, and big bad wolves. But tonight they're venturing even deeper into dark waters by providing the live soundtrack to creepy silents by early avant-gardists Dr. James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, 1928's Fall of the House of Usher and 1933's Lot in Sodom. Also on this Other Cinema bill … an intermission performance rumored to include Hans Grüsel's own take on the similarly umlauted Motörhead's "Ace of Spades.""