Ausgangers

What is in a name? Having found the excellent krautrock whorls of sound of the new Ausgang via Prog Not Frog (whole album there to download) I started trawling for info. only to find most references to a Birmingham punk/goth band or a man playing the harp with his feet or a slide show of dog photographs (some with their teeth bared like the front cover of Heathen Earth).

Ausgang means exit in German which slangs up as ass

(((( arse, in British, I'd suggest means something entirely other, the r adding a holiday postcard dimension, the r losing any affinity with sex as an act, fucking someone up the ass seems to evoke Burt Reynolds and Jon pop-eyed Voight in a canoe, paddling like crazy... while arse seems like something Kenneth Connor would slap ))))

But it's the fact that the group chose to share a name with another band that I find interesting - I mean, the assumption here is that the name is deliberate (the internet is a friend) which then begs the question of motive:

1) To obliterate a grievance with the members of the original band? To take thier name and their identity and to supercede that name, obliterating everything that has gone before?

2) A desire to compete with the still existing other?

3a) A need to evoke the other is some, perhaps unconscious, way? A need to exemplify perhaps a strand in the other that you feel is incomplete?

3b) Perhaps the members of Ausgang 2 have some relation with Ausgang 1 in the past? Maye a gig they went to that fried a neuron in the right place at the right time, a moment of supreme clarity which imprinted like a Lorenz goose or the beginnings of a Freudian incest fetish or a generative form of Leary's 8 circuit model of consciousness?

4) Maybe a member of the band has the 'real' name Ausgang and needed to express it - there's a guy in North Petherton called Gnarls Barkley (his face a mass of clotted cream and beardbits, old Jethro Tull album sleeves taped to his arms and legs for warmth in the wintertime) and if he decides to pick up his dulcimer and play again what the hell options does he have?

5a) It could be ignorance, I suppose. Think Plasticman / Plastikman, though the weight of musical history played heavy enough there to force a switch. Even so, ignorance is rarely accidental.

5b) Did Nirvana know about Nirvana? Neither sound especially bliss-full to my ears.

Ausgang - The Highs And Lows

A Yousendit Sour Kraut