Decoder is a bizarre, neon-drenched, proto-cyberpunk, bureaucratic surveillance drama film from West Germany featuring FM Einheit of German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten as a young noise freak with hacking ambitions employed in a hamburger shop. He discovers that replacing the Muzak (background music played in retail stores, elevators) imposed by the government with industrial noise will alter people's behaviour. Inspired by an encounter with a noise-pirate high priest (played by Genesis P-Orridge of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle), he rebels against the Government for using music as weapon of corporate mind-control and environmental sedation leading to consumerism and massification. He then plays his mix partly made up of the distorted bleat of a screaming frog, only to turn into the countries most wanted noise terrorist for inciting riots.
Decoder is inspired by the Electronic Revolution (1970) by William S. Burroughs, who appears in the film, it has a strong anti-consumerist message, quotes about Lady Di (Diana), biblical metaphors using frogs as symbols for the vagina. The film is also notable for starring no real actors, Bill Rice (East village avant-garde artist) is Jaeger, a peep-show obsessed company man tasked with starring at snowy surveillance monitors all day, is assigned to putting an end the F.M.'s operation. Christian F. plays FM's girlfriend, a punk peepshow worker who prefers the company of her pet frogs to humans.
Muscha's Decoder is a cult classic and a criminally under-seen masterpiece of German weirdness, before the Internet and cyber warfare shot on 16mm, peppered with bright pink, blue, and green hues with camera work by the Viennese / New Yorker Hannah Heer. It should be considered required watching for anyone who love Shinya Tsukamoto's classic cyberpunks, Sogo Ishii's Electric Dragon 80.000 V and films such as They Live, Vortex (1982) and Liquid Sky. The film is battered in 80s industrial/electronica culture by intense soundtrack from the likes of Einsturzende Neubauten, Soft Cell, The The, and Psychic Tv.
