KMFDM (originally Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid, wrong German that may be interpreted as "No Majority for the Compassion") is a multinational industrial rock band from Hamburg led by Sascha Konietzko, who founded the band in 1984 as a performance art project.
The band's earliest incarnation included German drummer En Esch and British vocalist Raymond Watts, with Watts leaving and rejoining the group several times over its history. The trio recorded the band's earliest albums in Germany before Konietzko and Esch moved to the United States, where they found much greater success with seminal industrial record label Wax Trax!. German guitarist Günter Schulz joined in 1990. Both he and Esch continued with the band until KMFDM broke up in 1999. In 2002, Konietzko resurrected KMFDM on Metropolis Records. Esch and Schulz declined to rejoin.
By 2005, Konietzko had assembled a consistent line-up that included American singer Lucia Cifarelli (whom he married), British guitarists Jules Hodgson and Steve White, and British drummer Andy Selway. In 2007, Konietzko and Cifarelli moved back to Germany, while the rest of the band stayed in the U.S. Hodgson and White moved on to other pursuits between 2015 and 2017, leaving the band a working trio unofficially. In addition to these core members, dozens of other musicians have worked with the group across its twenty-two studio albums and over two dozen singles, with sales totaling in excess of two million records worldwide.
Critics consider KMFDM one of the first bands to bring industrial music to mainstream audiences, though Konietzko refers to the band's music as "The Ultra-Heavy Beat". The band incorporates heavy metal guitar riffs, electronic music, samples, and both male and female vocals in its music, which encompasses a variety of styles including industrial metal and electronic body music. The band is fiercely political, with many of its lyrics taking stands against violence, war, and oppression. KMFDM normally tours at least once after every major release, and band members are known for their accessibility to and interaction with fans, both online and at concerts. Members, independently or working together and with other musicians, have recorded under many other names, primarily Watts' Pig, Konietzko's Excessive Force, and Esch and Schulz's Slick Idiot.
History
Origin (1984)
KMFDM was officially founded in Paris, France, on February 29, 1984, as a performance art project between Sascha Konietzko and German painter and multimedia artist Udo Sturm at the opening of an exhibition of young European artists at the Grand Palais. The first show consisted of Sturm playing an ARP 2600 synthesizer, Konietzko playing bass guitars with their amplifiers spread throughout the building, and four Polish coal miners (whom Konietzko had met at a bordello) pounding on the foundations of the Grand Palais.
Name
KMFDM is an initialism for the nonsensical and grammatically incorrect German phrase Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid, which, keeping the same word order, literally translates as "no majority for the pity", but is typically given the loose translation of "no pity for the majority". In the original phrase, the articles preceding the nouns Mehrheit and Mitleid are inflected for the wrong gender, as the proper declension would be Keine Mehrheit für das Mitleid. Swapping the two nouns yields the grammatically correct Kein Mitleid für die Mehrheit, which translates directly as "no pity for the majority".
The initialism has jokingly been said to stand for "Kill Mother-Fucking Depeche Mode", coined by the band on their first U.S. tour and used as recently as the album Kunst, where a lyric referencing this is in the titular track.
Early years in Germany (1984–1989)
Sturm left early on, but Konietzko continued performing, at one point having twenty people in his troupe, which by then was engaged in antics such as fire eating and throwing entrails at audiences. Konietzko then returned to Hamburg, where he joined up with Peter Missing in his new band Missing Foundation. Drummer Nicklaus Schandelmaier, who had recently moved to Hamburg from Frankfurt, joined the group, and took the stage name En Esch. Although the group did some live performances, Konietzko and Esch dropped out of Missing Foundation before any recordings were made and went back to work as KMFDM, collaborating with Hamburg-based studio owner Raymond Watts.
Cassette copies of the band's demo album, Opium, began circulating through the underground clubs and bars of Hamburg in 1984. KMFDM released its debut album, What Do You Know, Deutschland?, in December 1986. It was recorded from 1983 to 1986, with some of the songs recorded by Konietzko and Watts before Esch was a member of the band, and indeed, before the band officially existed. Skysaw Records gave the album a second UK release in 1987 and introduced the band to visual artist Aidan Hughes, usually credited as Brute! Hughes redesigned the album's cover, and went on to design almost every KMFDM album cover.
Watts left the group after working on just three songs on 1988's Don't Blow Your Top to start his own project, Pig. After working the Hamburg underground music scene and releasing albums on European labels, the band began its long-standing relationship with Wax Trax! Records when Don't Blow Your Top was licensed to the label for US distribution. The album was produced by Adrian Sherwood, and was described by AllMusic critic Dave Thompson as "[highlighting] the producer as much as the band".
Success in the US (1990–1994)
KMFDM recorded and released its third album, UAIOE, in early 1989 for distribution in both the U.S. and Europe, arrived in America for the first time on December 16, and commenced touring the U.S. with Ministry. During KMFDM's first US tour, band members started using the phrase "Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode" for the initialism to tease journalists who did not understand German. The band signed directly to Wax Trax! to distribute its fourth album, Naïve, which was recorded in Europe and featured the debut of guitarist Günter Schulz, known at the time as Svetlana Ambrosius. A remix of the album's title track was the group's first hit, reaching No. 21 on Billboards Dance/Club Play Songs Chart in March 1991.
Konietzko moved to Chicago in 1991, and Esch followed a year later. KMFDM quickly became a part of the Chicago industrial music scene that included Ministry, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, and Revolting Cocks. Konietzko later remarked, "We came from Germany and we all had to have day jobs and work our asses off to afford to be KMFDM and all of a sudden we're in the states and we're selling thousands of thousands of fucking records!"
The band's next club hit was "Split", which was released in June 1991 and reached No. 46 on Billboards Dance/Club Play Songs Chart in July. During 1991, Konietzko collaborated with Buzz McCoy of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult to record an album under the name Excessive Force titled Conquer Your World. Konietzko and Esch then began work on their halves of the intended fifth album, Apart, which was eventually released as two separate albums. Esch's half became his solo album, Cheesy, while the official KMFDM album used Konietzko's material and was renamed Money. This album spawned two more club hits in 1992: "Vogue", which reached No. 19 on the Billboard Dance/Club Play Songs Chart in April, and the title track, which reached No. 36 on that same chart in July.
After touring in 1992 with drummer Chris Vrenna, the then-core of KMFDM (Konietzko, Esch, Schulz, and second guitarist Mark Durante) returned to Chicago and found that Wax Trax! had filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy to begin corporate reorganization in November 1992. The band went into the studio in 1993 as a group to record its sixth album, Angst, which sold more than 100,000 copies over the next two years.
Esch said after the album's release, "I like this album way more. Money was done in a hurry, and I was doing a major Pigface tour, so I didn't have much influence on the album. I really like Angst. I'm totally down with it. We've tried to involve guitar players, we tried to be like a real band, especially in the creative kind of aspect." After the release of Angst, Wax Trax!/TVT Records launched a promotion in which fans were encouraged to devise as many alternate meanings for KMFDM as possible, with more than a thousand submissions resulting.
Konietzko released a second album under the Excessive Force moniker in 1993 titled Gentle Death. KMFDM received its first exposure to the mainstream with its single "A Drug Against War". Despite the band's anti-MTV stance, the video of "A Drug Against War" received airplay on MTV and was shown on the MTV cartoon Beavis and Butt-head. The track "Light" reached No. 31 on the Billboard Dance/Club Play Songs Chart in May 1994.
The song "Liebeslied" from Naïve originally contained an unlicensed sample of "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Orff's publisher threatened the band with legal action, and the album was withdrawn from production in 1993. A new version of the album, titled Naïve/Hell to Go, was released the following year. It contained new mixes of several songs, including a version of "Liebeslied" with the offending sample removed.
Wax Trax! was saved from bankruptcy by an infusion of funds from TVT Records, and in March 1994 announced plans to release the compilation set Black Box – Wax Trax! Records: The First 13 Years, which includes the KMFDM songs "Virus" and "Godlike", two songs which Thompson called "defining".
Peak popularity (1994–1999)
The mid-to-late 1990s were KMFDM's most successful years in terms of album sales and mainstream awareness. Konietzko moved to Seattle in 1994, while Esch moved to New Orleans. Watts rejoined the band to work on its seventh album, Nihil, which peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and sold 209,000 copies, making it the band's best-selling album. It marked the first contributions by drummer Bill Rieflin, who worked with the band on its next five albums. Nihil featured KMFDM's most widely known song, "Juke Joint Jezebel", versions of which appeared on both the Bad Boys and Mortal Kombat soundtracks, the latter of which peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard 200 and sold over 1.8 million copies. Their song "Ultra" was used in the English version of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie.
Commenting on the rotating cast of musicians shortly after Nihils release, Konietzko said, "It's as if En and I are the suns and the other musicians at the time come and revolve around us." Regarding the duo's dynamic, Konietzko said, "En Esch and myself have always been the cornerstone of KMFDM's existence. And we are diametrically opposed as writers. The angsty stuff generally comes from him. The poppy, hard stuff comes from me." Esch commented in 1994, "Sascha and myself are different, of course. But that's why we can still make things happen. Our best and worst qualities are contrary. To put it simply, he's more organized and stable, I'm more complicated and abstract."
In late 1995, close friend and president of Chicago's Wax Trax! Jim Nash died of an illness complicated by AIDS, and Seattle became the official headquarters of KMFDM. Watts toured with KMFDM throughout 1995 in support of Nihil, but then left the group to return to recording under the Pig moniker. Esch separated from the group, and Xtort was created in 1996 almost entirely without his input. Konietzko instead brought in a number of other industrial artists such as Chris Connelly to assist with the album.