The best thing about the German language is its love of compound words.
For example: when refrigerators were invented, rather than come up with a word for the fancy appliance, they simply took the word for “cool” (kühl) and the word for “cupboard” (schrank) and put them together to form the delightful Kühlschrank. Similarly, they took the word for hand, the word for shoe, and combined them Handschuh – or as we say in English, “glove.” The next time you need to go shopping for some boring old gloves, tell yourself you’re going to find a new pair of handshoes and see for yourself how much more fun it feels.
At a certain point though, this word-melding stops being fun and just becomes ridiculous. For instance, the German name for stores specializing in Christmas tree decorations is a 49-letter word that translates roughly to Christmastreedecorationspecialtyshop. That’s not cute or efficient; it’s cruel to everyone from foreigners to kids learning to read, not to mention people who make signs for Christmas tree decoration specialty shops.
Thankfully, when German electronic duo Modselektor joined forces with fellow German musician Apparat (from week 128) to form an electro-supergroup of sorts, they realized that when combining words, you don’t need to combine whole words, just bits of them.
So rather than becoming Modselektorapparat, they became the much more reasonable (and rather catchy) Moderat.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The off-beat percussion between beats two and three of each bar. Like the hyphen connecting two words.
2. If you listen carefully you can hear that the vocals are doubled, with one voice an octave higher than the other. Lower case and upper case.
3. Compared to the original, this remix is more driving, and perhaps a bit spookier. The remixing is courtesy of another German artist, Siriusmo, whom we met in week 512. Fittingly, his stage name is also a compound: Sirius was the name of his first band, and Moritz is his actual name.
Recommended listening activity:
Grabbing a drink from your cool cupboard and cradling it in your hand shoes.