It is said that guitar multitasker Beat Keller and extreme turntablist Joke Lanz are simply two Swiss guys with a suitcase in Berlin. But that’s just a clever disguise. In reality, they are two extraterrestrials who occasionally take a trip to Planet Earth. The title of their second album, "People Do Strange Things", almost blew their cover, for in making such a brazen outsider's observation they came within a hair’s breadth of revealing that they were not, in fact, human. Their music is likewise an expression of a rigorous musical Kaspar Hauserism. Two intergalactic beings, who have never encountered Earth’s music, mingle with the art- and culture-conscious human race, eavesdrop on the guiding principles of its sonic arts, and then – free from all prejudice, categories, and hierarchies – toss everything that has reached their ears into one glorious melting pot. The result instantly renders absurd everything we thought we knew about music. What ordinary mortals might hastily describe as a mad blend of MadHop, Hyper-Chanson, Death Jazz, Euromericana, Cyber Blues, Fluxus kitsch, Schlaga-Dada, sampling terrorism and trivial avantgarde, they simply call "music" – because they don’t know any better. How could they?

On their journey through outer space, they encountered Earth émigré Jim Morrison, who invited them to wormhole his poem "Bird of Prey" straight into their song “Harry Kane". They pillaged Hildegard Knef, Tom Waits and Lydia Lunch, and accidentally slipped across various social media platforms, whose convoluted logic they digested into their songs with equal measures of ruthlessness and complete lack of filtering. Just before crash-landing on the blue planet, they hurriedly devoured a few novels by James Joyce, whose absurd streams of consciousness they fed through an intergalactic language shredder. What emerged was a heap of meaningless informational junk that de-mediatises all the cacophonous blah-blah-blah of our artificially intellectualised cyber society.

But how did they come up with the grotesque band name TWO DOGS? Insiders and fellow travellers on this insane galactic road trip know the answer. While Beat Keller is more of a cat person, Joke Lanz actually acquired a dog for his earthly existence. Yet somewhere at a crossroads between Winterthur and Berlin-Schöneberg, they witnessed two four-legged creatures – a Miniature Pinscher and an Irish Wolfhound – unexpectedly finding themselves face to face and erupting into full-throated barking. What, they wondered for a brief moment, could these two strange creatures possibly have to say to each other? They came to the astonishing realisation that this was exactly how they wanted to shape their music. In doing so, they transcend all notions of rigour in human music-making and open up an entirely new way for us Earthlings to experience something we had previously thought beyond comprehension in the universe.

Back in New York’s No Wave scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, similar approaches by Arto Lindsay, James Chance and Christian Marclay were, for lack of a better term, called "Fake Jazz". But those Earthlings were still trapped within their terrestrial limitations. TWO DOGS are something entirely different. "People Do Strange Things" isn’t merely a fake: it’s the fake of a fake of a fake of a fake and so on ad infinitum – which makes it the most ingenious and genuine creation produced in ten thousand years of music. No more, and most certainly no less.

Wolf Kampmann