About KMFDM
KMFDM is a multinational industrial rock band from Hamburg led by Sascha Konietzko, who founded the band in 1984 as a performance art project.
The band's earliest incarnation included German drummer En Esch and British vocalist Raymond Watts, the latter of whom left and rejoined the group several times over its history. The trio recorded the band's earliest albums in Germany before Konietzko and Esch moved to the United States, where they found much greater success with seminal industrial record label Wax Trax!. German guitarist Günter Schulz joined in 1990; both he and Esch continued with the band until KMFDM broke up in 1999. Konietzko resurrected KMFDM in 2002 on Metropolis Records, and by 2005 he had assembled a consistent line-up that included American singer Lucia Cifarelli, British guitarists Jules Hodgson and Steve White, and British drummer Andy Selway. Konietzko and Cifarelli moved back to Germany in 2007, while the rest of the band stayed in the U.S. Hodgson and White moved on to other pursuits between 2015 and 2017, leaving the band a working trio unofficially. In addition to these core members, dozens of other musicians have worked with the group across its twenty-two studio albums and over two dozen singles, with sales totaling in excess of two million records worldwide.
Critics consider KMFDM one of the first bands to bring industrial music to mainstream audiences, though Konietzko refers to the band's music as "The Ultra-Heavy Beat". The band incorporates heavy metal guitar riffs, electronic music, samples, and both male and female vocals in its music, which encompasses a variety of styles including industrial rock and electronic body music. The band is fiercely political, with many of its lyrics taking stands against violence, war, and oppression. KMFDM normally tours at least once after every major release, and band members are known for their accessibility to and interaction with fans, both online and at concerts. Members, independently or working together and with other musicians, have recorded under many other names, primarily Watts' Pig, Konietzko's Excessive Force, and Esch and Schulz's Slick Idiot.
KMFDM was officially founded in Paris, France, on February 29, 1984, as a performance art project between Sascha Konietzko and German painter and multimedia artist Udo Sturm at the opening of an exhibition of young European artists at the Grand Palais. The first show consisted of Sturm playing an ARP 2600 synthesizer, Konietzko playing bass guitars with their amplifiers spread throughout the building, and four Polish coal miners pounding on the foundations of the Grand Palais.
KMFDM is an initialism for the nonsensical and grammatically incorrect German phrase Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid, which, keeping the same word order, literally translates as "no majority for the pity", but is typically given the loose translation of "no pity for the majority". In the original phrase, the articles preceding the nouns Mehrheit and Mitleid are inflected for the wrong gender, as the proper declension would be Keine Mehrheit für das Mitleid. Swapping the two nouns yields the grammatically correct Kein Mitleid für die Mehrheit, which translates directly as "no pity for the majority". In a 2003 interview, Konietzko explained the origins of the phrase:
"On the morning of February 29th, 1984 I woke up and went down to breakfast at a hotel in Paris. We had a show that night opening for an exhibition for young European artists. ... we needed a motto for the night so that we could make up some fliers and post them around. There was a German newspaper on the table and so I started cutting out words and threw them all into a cap. We picked a few of them out and it read "Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid". It's kinda improper German in regards to its translation but in the DA-DA-esque mindset of the early morning it made perfect sense. So when I was on my way back to Hamburg I'd mentioned it to Raymond . He liked it but he was having difficulty pronouncing it correctly. So finally he said, 'Why don't you just call it KMFDM?' So that was it. We were KMFDM."
Map & Directions To Venue
