Muscha aka Jürgen Muschalek was a German punk musician, painter, film- and video-artist.
He was born 28 September 1951 and died 31 July 2003 in Düsseldorf, Germany (suicide).
He played guitar in Charley's Girls, a Düsseldorf and Köln based german Punk band formed in 1977. He was also the director of Decoder.
Decoder, a dystopian German film from 1984 about Muzak and the power of tape recorders, takes Burroughs' writings from the early 1970s to their logical conclusion. The movie stars the cream of Industrial music and the darker reaches of post-punk culture; the soundtrack to the film, featuring Genesis P-Orridge, FM Einheit, and Soft Cell's Dave Ball, among others, is a notable document of the industrial era.
FM Einheit, also known as Mufti from Einstürzende Neubauten, is Decoder's wily protagonist. Bill Rice, the only person in the film with any bona fide acting credentials, plays a sad man with a painfully sad face, entrusted by Muzak with foiling Einheit's plans. The German underground fixture Christiane F plays a seductress of sorts, a punky peepshow worker in Hamburg's infamous red-light district, the Reeperbahn, who harbors a strange obsession with frogs. (The Reeperbahn scenes in the film are soundtracked by Soft Cell's 'Seedy Films'.)
Burroughs himself has a cameo in the film, appearing as a shop owner who sells electronic gear; Burroughs gives Einheit a cassette tape, and tells him that it is all he needs. Genesis P-Orridge makes a cameo appearance in the movie as a priest in reverse, intoning lines like "Information is like a bank; our job is to rob that bank."
