KMFDM’s ‘Tohuvabohu’ turns 19 on 21 August
KMFDM released “Tohuvabohu” on 21 August 2007 through Metropolis Records and KMFDM Records. The eleven-track album turns 19 this year. Full credits inside.
KMFDM, the industrial and EBM group led by Sascha Konietzko, released “Tohuvabohu” on 21 August 2007 through Metropolis Records and the band’s own KMFDM Records. The album turns 19 this year. It ran to eleven tracks on CD and arrived between “Hau Ruck” in 2005 and “Blitz” in 2009. The title comes from the biblical Hebrew phrase “tohu va bohu”, meaning “without form and void”; KMFDM Records described the word as meaning “wild and chaotic”.
How KMFDM recorded ‘Tohuvabohu’ in Seattle
Konietzko and Jules Hodgson produced the album. The band recorded at Kommandozentrale and The Black Lab Studio in Seattle, mixed at Chicago Recording Company in Chicago and again at Kommandozentrale, and Brian Gardner mastered it at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood. The line-up was Konietzko on vocals, analogue synthesizers, bass and programming, Lucia Cifarelli on vocals, Hodgson on guitar, bass, synthesizer and programming, Steve White on guitar, synthesizer and programming, and Andy Selway on drums and programming. Amy Denio added alto saxophone to the opening track and Jim Knodle played trumpet on it. The eleven tracks are “Superpower”, “Looking For Strange”, “Tohuvabohu”, “I Am What I Am”, “Saft Und Kraft”, “Headcase”, “Los Niños Del Parque”, “Not In My Name”, “Spit Or Swallow”, “Fait Accompli” and “Bumaye”.
Two tracks carry outside material. “Superpower” is built around recordings made by KMFDM listeners, who called a phone line the band set up and taped what the group meant to them; further calls from the same line surfaced a year later as “What We Do For You” on the companion remix album “Brimborium”. “Los Niños Del Parque” is a cover of the Liaisons Dangereuses track written by Beate Bartel, Chrislo Haas and Krishna Goineau, and is the one song on the record not credited to the band.
The sleeve produced a public disagreement. Aidan Hughes, who works as Brute! and has drawn almost every KMFDM cover since 1987, posted to his blog in June 2007 that he was unhappy with the changes made to his submitted artwork: the red palette had been switched to orange, and the stylised buildings and cranes in the background had been replaced with a starburst. Metropolis Records reissued the album as a remastered digital edition in 2012.
About KMFDM
KMFDM began in Paris on 29 February 1984, as a performance art project between Sascha Konietzko and the German painter and multimedia artist Udo Sturm, staged at the opening of an exhibition of young European artists at the Grand Palais. Sturm played an ARP 2600 synthesizer, Konietzko played bass guitars through amplifiers spread through the building, and four Polish coal miners pounded on the building’s foundations. The name is an initialism of the deliberately ungrammatical German phrase Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid, usually given the loose translation “no pity for the majority”. Konietzko has called the band’s music “The Ultra-Heavy Beat”.
Sturm left early. Konietzko returned to Hamburg and joined Peter Missing in Missing Foundation, where he met drummer Nicklaus Schandelmaier, who took the stage name En Esch. The two left Missing Foundation before any recordings were made and resumed work as KMFDM with the Hamburg studio owner Raymond Watts. The debut album “What Do You Know, Deutschland?” appeared in December 1986, assembled from sessions running back to 1983, some of them cut by Konietzko and Watts before Esch joined. Skysaw Records gave it a second UK release in 1987, which brought Aidan Hughes to the band; he redesigned that cover and stayed.
Watts worked on three songs for “Don’t Blow Your Top” in 1988, then left to start PIG. That album was licensed to Wax Trax! Records for US distribution, and “UAIOE” followed in 1989. The band signed directly to Wax Trax! for “Naïve” in 1990, which introduced guitarist Günter Schulz. Konietzko moved to Chicago in 1991 and Esch followed a year later; “Money” came in 1992 and “Angst” in 1993. Konietzko relocated to Seattle in 1994, and in late 1995 the city became the band’s official headquarters. Watts rejoined for “Nihil” in 1995, which sold roughly 209,000 copies, the band’s best-selling album; Bill Rieflin played drums. “Xtort” in 1996 reached No. 92, the band’s highest chart placing, and Esch returned for “Symbols” in 1997, the year Tim Skold joined.
KMFDM broke up on 22 January 1999, with only Konietzko and Skold remaining. “Adios” arrived three months later and reached No. 189 on the Billboard 200. Schulz and Esch formed Slick Idiot; Konietzko and Skold regrouped as MDFMK with singer Lucia Cifarelli and released one album through Republic/Universal. Konietzko announced KMFDM’s return in early 2001, citing public demand, and “Attak” followed in March 2002 on Metropolis Records. Skold left after it to join Marilyn Manson. Selway first played drums on “WWIII” in 2003, the last album Watts performed on, and White contributed to “Hau Ruck” in 2005. The demo album “Opium” was reissued in 2002 as the first release on KMFDM Records, and Metropolis reissued the Wax Trax!-era studio catalogue in pairs and threes between September 2006 and May 2007.
“Tohuvabohu” closed that stretch. Two months after it came out, Konietzko announced he was moving back to Germany within three months; Cifarelli went with him while the rest of the band stayed in the United States. “Brimborium” followed in 2008, then “Blitz” in 2009, “WTF?!” in 2011, “Kunst” in 2013 and “Our Time Will Come” in 2014. White and Hodgson were unavailable for “Hell Yeah” in 2017, so Chris Harms of Lord Of The Lost recorded the guitar parts; when Lord Of The Lost could not obtain US work visas for the supporting tour, Andee Blacksugar took the touring guitar role and stayed until 2025. “Paradise” was released on 27 September 2019, with Watts guesting for the first time since 2003, followed by “Hyëna” on 9 September 2022 and “Let Go” on 2 February 2024, which marked forty years since the Grand Palais show. Esch, meanwhile, returned to his own catalogue, reported here in En Esch returns with first album in eight years: ‘Dance Hall Putsch’.
The band’s current record is “Enemy”, announced in KMFDM announce new album ‘Enemy’ on Metropolis Records and trailed by the remix covered in KMFDM releases ‘Enemy (Inhalt Geld ’88 Remix)’. The European tour built around it was pushed back, as reported in KMFDM postpone 2026 European tour, will still release ‘Enemy’. Nineteen years on, “Tohuvabohu” stands as the last KMFDM album completed before Konietzko left Seattle for Germany.
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