This is a completely wonderful Punk Rock record that I had a hard time finding. I learned of this band when Dennis Cooper did a post on his blog about three amazing authors who died before their respective times, and possibly before their best work was yet to happen. Tristan Egolf was one of them, having committed suicide in 2005, just after completing the manuscript for his last novel. There were a couple of amazing YouTube clips in the post, one of Tristan and others stripping down and forming an Abu Ghraib-like human pyramid during the protest of one of George Bush’s 2004 campaign stops in Pennsylvania, and another, a video for a song called “Gone Sane” by a band called Kitschchao. In it is live footage of the band, with Tristan singing in a thrift store dress, his head painted green and bright-red-mohawked. The song was great, and the video made me an instant fan, so in addition to ordering more of Tristan’s books I decided that I wanted to get whatever recordings the band had made. I looked around, and it seemed that the only Kitschchao record to be found was this 45, released on Compulsiv Records in 1993. After a lot of searching, the only copy I could determine the availability of was a used one in Holland. The a-side song, “Peter Stumpe,” is about an infamous German of the same name, executed on March 31, 1590, in the ancient town of Bedburg, for werewolfery. According to Montague Summer’s book The Werewolf, which was published in the 30’s and is considered to be a textbook of werewolfery and lycanthropy, he was accused of, among other things, having “destroyed and spoiled an unknown number of Men, Women, and Children, sheep, Lambs, and Goats, and other Cattle.” Also he was said to have slept with his sister, impregnated his daughter, devoured the brains of his son, and he apparently had a particular fancy for the flesh of young maidens, which he found to be “…both sweet and dainty in taste.” Tristan Egolf’s interest in lycanthropy is also to be seen in his last, and posthumously published novel, Kornwolf, which is about a mute Amish boy named Ephraim who stalks his hometown by night in the form of a stinky wolf who happens to look a lot like Richard Nixon. Ephraim’s particular shape-shifting talent is a family trait that reaches back into ancient European history, when villagers and livestock were occasionally culled (and ravaged) by various metamorphic fiends who, by day, walked indistinguishably among their victims.
“Peter Stumpe” is groovy. Tristan’s singing sounds a little like a more focused and fired-up Guy Picciotto. The songs are really heavy and affecting, extremely catchy, and have been stuck in my head for days. I MySpaced Dave Stauffer, who played drums in Kitschchao and maintains a nice page about the late band and the late Egolf. I asked him if there were any more recordings available, and he very generously wrote back to say that a cd/dvd was in the works, and meant to come out soon, hopefully. He recommended that I keep a lookout. He also said that this 45 contains his favorite recorded versions of both songs.
Gone Sane [2:35m]: 
