[engl] In 1983, Dieter Moebius (Cluster) and legendary producer Conny Plank teamed up for the third time, resulting in the Zero Set project. On this occasion, they were backed up by one of the best drummers on the German rock scene: Mani Neumeier of Guru Guru. Moebius had got to know and admire him as the live drummer for Harmonia (Moebius, Roedelius, Rother) and during the recording sessions for their second album (De Luxe). Conny Plank, usually more of a background figure as producer, takes an equal share of the limelight alongside the musicians. His supermodern studio is brought into play like an instrument in its own right; Plank explores the full range of audio editing, pushing recording techniques to the limit to achieve maximum brilliance and plasticity. Neumeier uses all of his many years of experience as a drummer, demonstrating the precision and stamina of a drum machine, just infinitely livelier and more inventive. And finally, to Moebius. Always one of the patriarchs of German electronic music, a creator of the most bizarre sound happenings, yet never sounding forced or arbitrary. On the contrary, he consistently worked within the context of the tracks themselves and their relationship to each other. The music on Zero Set flows both smoothly and energetically. No single idea is overplayed, none of the tracks hits the ten minute mark. Aural and musical structures are concentrated to the point of askesis, yet there is no mistaking just how much the musicians are relishing playing together – these are the two very different, yet defining characteristics of the album. Moebius, Neumeier and Plank are unsentimental in their use of technology, exploiting it as an effective tool in pursuit of their musical vision. Three musicians at the top of their game and far too smart to allow their efforts to drift into psychedelic meanderings.

[engl] The musician Kurt Dahlke is not only a member of the bands Der Plan and Fehlfarben, founding member of the group DAF and co-founder of the label Ata Tak, he has also released a stellar line of solo works under the name Pyrolator for which he enjoys great critical acclaim. What began in 1979 with the first release "Inland" continues it's lineal thread with new work "Niemandsland" – the sixth album within the Land series. It was 1979, some 43 years ago, when Pyrolator released Inland, an instrumental protest album, as he liked to think of it. Autumnal protests against nuclear weapon stations, against the entire structures of the war generation, but without the pathos of the rebellious songs which soundtracked the 1968 movement. Apart from a few samples, there were no words at all. Now, more than four decades later, Kurt Dahlke alias Pyrolator returns to his origins. But not, this time, in protest: “The clock already stands at ten past midnight and we have arrived in no man’s land. Neither the student movement nor the rejectionist stance of punk changed anything. Avarice has emerged victorious and no future is nothing more than an empty cliché. This is what global reality looks like. The principle of cause and effect.” This is also a back to the roots story for Pyrolator in the musical sense. Niemandsland was created exclusively with modular synthesizers, the computer merely a recording device. All of the tracks were played live and direct – neither storable nor replicable. The sixth album in Pyrolator’s Land series is more than just a bridge to the past and the music to be found there. It has a formal language all of its own, meandering between the beauty of crystal clear melodies and restrained ambient moments on the one hand and rugged, dystopian brittleness on the other. A cycle revolving between the hope of a revolution for humanity and arrival in no man’s land.

[engl] Revered Hamburg musician, synthesist and DJ RVDS joins the Bureau B ranks with the meditative and mellifluous sounds of ‘Moods and Dances 2021’ - a musical present from the future past.

[engl] The first part of Hans-Joachim Roedelius' Selbstportrait (Self-Portrait) series was originally released under the title 'Sanfte Musik' on Sky Records in 1979. Now, some forty years later, a new instalment has arrived in the form of an album entitled 'Wahre Liebe'

[engl] During the legendary Forst years Roedelius had a private workspace with a Farfisa organ, a Revox-A77 tape machine, an echo device and a synthesizer which he borrowed from the Cluster studio next door now and again. Here he experimented, practised, allowed his imagination to flow, at any hour of the day or night, whenever he was not in the studio with Dieter Moebius and/or Michael Rother at work on new Cluster or Harmonia material. Roedelius always let the tape run, in order to analyze the ideas thus captured more effectively on repeated listening. The recordings offer us a deep insight into the creative process of his music. Fleeting notes, slivers of ideas, so to speak, moments of inspiration. Finger exercises, experiments in harmony, studies in rhythm are also preserved on these magnetic tapes.

[engl] 'Morphing Polaroids' is the debut album by Japanese born Saeko Okuchi alias Saeko Killy for Hamburg- based Bureau B. After moving to Berlin in 2018 Saeko Killy found herself in the orb of Club Sameheads, where she made herself known as a DJ and live performer. After releasing her first EP " ???????? ?? – Dancing Pikapika" with the label Chill Mountain from Osaka in 2021, followed a fruitful Jam session during the pandemic lockdown, resulting in the eleven titles collected together here for the album 'Morphing Polaroids' produced by Brussels DJ and selector soFa elsewhere. The LP is a contemporary Leftfield Clubsound, effortlessly combining elements of Dub, Post-Punk and Kraut with electronic Beats.

[engl] Compiled by Ralf Köster, DJ and curator of Hamburg’s Golden Pudel Club, "Where The Rabbit Sleeps" is an extensive collection of tracks by Sensorama, a project comprising Jörn Elling Wuttke and Roman Flügel. Working as a production team since the late 1980s in various guises such as Acid Jesus, Alter Ego and Primitive Painter, the pair also founded several labels with DJ Ata and Heiko MSO (Ongaku, Klang Elektronik, Playhouse). They released their debut album as Sensorama in 1995. The Darmstadt duo blazed completely new trails in those days, as Andreas Dorau noted: «Sensorama is artful techno, what one used to call intelligent techno. All in the best of taste, not so far removed from the realms of fine art.» Their music draws on a wide range of influences which reach far beyond the generic borders of techno. «Inspired by the the Krautrock of the 1970s, they were less interested in making Frankfurt Techno than they were in the electronic music of NEU!, Cluster and Kraftwerk. A Darmstadt-Düsseldorf axis, so to speak,» Christoph Dallach explains. «They kept records in the studio by the likes of La Düsseldorf or Pyrolator, playing them from time to time to refresh their auditory nerves, to clean out their ears.». Sensorama released the last of their three albums in 2001, leaving us with an extraordinary body of work which still resonates today. Charlotte Goltermann, founder of the Ladomat 2000 label and A&R manager for the third LP, recalls: «I’ve rarely come across artists who had such a clear idea of what they wanted – or did not want and consequently would not do. They were artists without fear, who would not shut out anyone who loved music, yet remained strictly underground themselves.» The new compilation "Where The Rabbit Sleeps" offers a deep insight into the musical world of Sensorama. It is available on CD or as a double LP with a gatefold cover, remastered by Andreas [Lupo] Lubich, with new artwork by Rike Weigert and liner notes by Charlotte Goltermann, Christoph Dallach and Andreas Dorau.

[engl] The Berlin project Sprung Aus Den Wolken was part of the "Geniale Dilletanten" movement in the early 1980s, along with Einstürzende Neubauten and Mechanik Destrüktiw Komandöh. The band first released an EP on ZickZack in 1981, followed by further releases on the band's own record label Faux Pas in 1982 and 1983, then on the French outlet Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'Acier until 1991. The track Pas Attendre was part of the soundtrack of Wim Wender's movie Der Himmel Über Berlin and thus became an underground hit. Bureau B is thrilled to now re-release the debut EP under the title "1981 West Berlin" including additional songs from the band's early days, which have been carefully remastered from the original cassettes.

[engl] The Berlin project Sprung Aus Den Wolken was part of the "Geniale Dilletanten" movement in the early 1980s, along with Einstürzende Neubauten and Mechanik Destrüktiw Komandöh. The band first re- leased an EP on ZickZack in 1981, followed by further releases on the band's own record label Faux Pas in 1982 and 1983, then on the French outlet Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'Acier until 1991. The track Pas Attendre was part of the soundtrack of Wim Wender’s movie Der Himmel über Berlin and thus became an underground hit. Founder of the band Kiddy Citny is also a painter. His paintings of the Berlin Wall have been exhibited around the world and are now in private collections in the US, France and Japan. Bureau B is pleased to finally make the long out-of-print, self-titled album from 1982 available again. Carefully remastered, with reconstructed original artwork, numerous photos and liner notes by Alexander Hacke.

[engl] After a period of distance Station 17 just wanted to stand in a room together again and make some music, so they drove out of Hamburg to a remote site in the hills of the Hohe Geest in Schleswig-Holstein and played some new song sketches together – all day and late into the night. Afterwards they wanted to play the results live at a concert in Fabrik, a venue in Hamburg. No one in the band expected that the sessions would result in an entire album, but the music told them once again: what had been created here in the radiance of the moment could not be reproduced. A moment of happiness for the band collective. "Oui Bitte", Station 17’s 11th album had been born – quite unexpectedly, between pool and trout pond. It shows again and par excellence that Station 17's is a pleasure to listen to. Why is that? You can either follow the intuitive reference play, the traces of genres (so to speak: listening with knowledge), or you can be geared to the dense interplay between driving, elegiac rhythms and a flowing, aesthetic stream of consciousness, either lying down or dancing with a liberated mind and body. Everything seems possible in the boundlessness of their music. The seven songs are irrigating these candid invitations into a flowing aesthetical stream bundling them into a pleasure which lets you forget your own disposition. “Oui Bitte” shows Station 17 as a band of experts in a kind of acoustic transcendence. Their music tenderly forces you to engage in all of this at the same time. Already in the field recordings of the Elbe shore with which “20.000 Meilen unter dem Mond” begins you are being offered a pact: Hand over all control to the music, swim out to the open sea and be thrown back to yourself – just so you can indulge in the sonic waves. That prelude seems programmatic: In the following 40 minutes you are being carried along, you are being amused, catapulted, earthed, moved. “Oui Bitte” manages to douse the resonance body, to drift away, to wash ashore, to take off. The landing: always soft! The biggest continuity is the positive vibe, a reliable air host, pleasant, more shell than irritation. Station 17 do not produce cracks in the dam, they are smoothing out riverbeds. “Bewegung” then appears as the highlight of the album, a manifestation of the idea Station 17. Move your mind and move your body, as Birgit Hohnen says here, a deceased companion of the group who is being projected into the present of the song through a sample. With your eyes closed this track allows you to take off meditatively. And then there’s the latent melancholy which finds its way in. This futuristic music of the past stays warm, stays cordial, stays inviting: to the sonic utopia of a more beautiful world which has already been established by this album at this point and by this band in any case. In the end the record takes its time, a wide room is designed, meters are being covered. In the calmness of the last song a contradiction pops up: “Das Rasen” (“The rushing”). But the contradiction dissolves: If you listen closely, you are gliding through the high grass (“Rasen”) on which to lie down and listen to “Oui Bitte” invites. Yes, please: Repeat!

[engl] Remix albums have already become a tradition in the 30-year history of the collective: In 2001, the legendary label Mute Records released the album "Mikroprofessor" with remixes by DJ Koze, Thomas Fehlmann, Justus Köhncke and To Rococo Rot. In 2011, the "Goldstein Variations Remixes" followed, including versions by Erobique, Tobias Thomas, but also by Ada and Mense Reents, who we will meet again here. Timidly, the band began to ask their favourite producers most of whom agreed without hesitation. Soon, a top-class remix album with a Who’s Who of the local electronic music landscape was ready and even if only the bases of the pieces are recognisable, a completely new listening experience has been created here. It's grown into an independent work through the versatility of the participants and their expertise and can be enjoyed detached from the original material. As if by magic, a simultaneously stringent and diverse vibe has emerged that makes "Oui Mixe" more than just an addition to "Oui Bitte". We start with Berghain regular Efdemin, who takes on the instrumental song '20.000 Meilen unter dem Mond'. Efdemin, real name Phillip Sollmann, belonged to the core of Dial Records and now releases on Ostgut Ton. He is considered one of the most important protagonists in contemporary techno, because in his work he understands like no other how to care for the dancefloor as well as the loudspeakers at home. In addition to his records as Efdemin, he also regularly presents and produces other experimental, avant-garde projects. ‘Hausmann', the origin of the remix idea, in the hands of Paul Frick is transformed into a Hi-NRG house number. Paul Frick is not only one third of Brandt-Brauer-Frick, but currently also a member of the legendary Tangerine Dream - a favourite band in the house of Station 17. Paul's version is a floorfiller for people who think they are tired and are proven wrong by the penetrating sound. Pantha du Prince picks up the energy of the whole album rebuilding "Pusch" on a pressing bass drum. Pantha du Prince, who has released modern classics of electronic music with 'This Bliss' and 'Black Noise', was in Thailand during the production. While he was producing the remix in the studio on the island of Ko Pha- ngan, a gang of monkeys stole his nuts: "Pantha du Prince Sharing Lunch with Apes RMX" - a poetry that only life can write. The Andreas Dorau number "Der Monat" is handled here by Toto Belmont from Helsinki. His association with the Hardwax Spectrum are clearly audible, but Kimmo Saastamoinen, as he is actually known, has long since found his own sound: Subtly driving, always slightly melancholic and peppered with billowing delays that you want to immerse yourself in. The number of projects in which Mense Reents has already participated is enormous. Let's limit ourselves here to his electronic projects Egoexpress and Die Vögel - and of course Die Goldenen Zitronen, among whose incredibly accomplished musicianship he is a big part of. The song "Bewegung" is given a subtle dancehall riddim and so many amazing details are flying around in the sound so that close-listening is recommended here without doubt. The biggest surprise is probably delivered by Ada: instead of moving the track "Aufgehoben", recorded again with Dorau, to the club, she simply wrote new music around the vocals, singing over them herself while picking up the trace elements of the original. In a club, this song could take on the role of the last track after a wild night: The lights come back on, but the body is still in the middle of it - and so the soul lifts itself with the music into a sphere reserved only for it: bliss. Michaela Dippel has ventured furthest away from the foundation and yet remains true to it: she picked up the melody that was lying there (according to the text) on the floor, sang it - and it sounded beautiful. Content and form combine and result in a new form, from which one can recognise the creative freedom that Station 17 generate. Finally, we drive slowly with Lawrence from the Forellenhof back to more urban realms. At night, through the province, until more and more lights appear and we finally find ourselves in the middle of a city that doesn't seem to sleep: With a lot of dub, "Das Rasen" thus becomes a deep house track in the hands of Dial Records founder Pete Kersten. A pleasantly soft stomping bass drum drives the melancholic arpeggiator synth. Station 17 are alive and kickin' - in their own and in other people's clothes.

[engl] The avant-garde Kraut ensemble Supersempfft laid the foundation for their techno-tropical pop music in 1979 with their debut album "Roboterwerke." In 1981, they followed up with the album "Metaluna," which is now being honored through a re-release on Bureau B. The group, consisting of Dieter Kolb, Franz Knüttel, and Franz Aumüller, fused global in?uences, experimental sonic landscapes, and surreal lyrics into a unique sonic cosmos. "Metaluna" stands out with its meandering sequences, unconventional rhythms, and psychedelic songwriting that remains groundbreaking even decades later. We live in the data rich days of the Internet age, when globalisation and mass communication have trivialised time and space, and fusion as follows, is now commonplace. While the entire world’s art and in?uences stream through your digital consciousness, any odd assemblage of creative diaspora makes just as much sense as the next – another eddy in the grand churn of genre-?uidity. As such, this Bureau B reissue of Supersempfft’s superb ‘Metaluna’ is particularly pertinent for a couple of key reasons. Firstly, that this collaborative AV ensemble laid down the template for techno-tropical pop way back in ‘81, an astonishing achievement which broke ground musically, culturally and technologically; and secondly, that the rest of us have ?nally found them in the future, and can at last move in time to their animated groove. Supersempfft is at once a star-sailing frog enjoying cartoon chaos around a cosmic Caribbean, and also the multi-disciplinary miscellany of a trio of school friends who never lost that youthful penchant for play. The postmodern project comprised of musical genius, Dieter Kolb, computer whiz Franz Knüttel and the boundlessly creative Franz Aumüller, whose vibrant visuals and surreal lyrics situated their sound in a universe all of its own. Operating out of the basement of Dieter’s parents’ instrument shop, the band began to explore their interests and share their talents with no consideration of a commercial goal. Rejecting rock from the off, Kolb dove into his love of global styles, surfacing only to borrow display models from upstairs which were swiftly modi?ed by Knüttel to reveal bold electronic possibilities beyond their intended use. Recognising his own shortcomings behind the kit, Knüttel built his own drum machine, Roboterwerke, which piqued the interest of Kraftwerk, Herbie Hancock and Tangerine Dream, and piece-by-piece their kaleidoscopic pop began to coalesce. The industry soon took notice, and a debut album emerged on CBS in ’79, though didn’t score the sales it deserved. After the ?rst album, Kolb and Aumüller’s love of reggae and dub took them on a transatlantic trip to Trinidad and Tobago under the false assumption that all the islands stepped to the Jamaican style. Any momentary disappointment was soon dispelled by the liveliness and optimism of calypso and soca, and a life af?rming experience at carnival left them awestruck and inspired. Back home, they began work on ‘Metaluna’, a wild combination of roving sequences, tropical rhythms, squashed brass and yearning vocals which sprints, skanks and soars through ten triumphant tracks. Amid the metallic beats and interplanetary idents lurk sublime melodies and soulful motifs, psychedelic songwriting reminiscent of Barrett, Beefheart or Brian Wilson at their best. In their dubbier moments, Supersempfft sound like Lee Perry jamming on an alien console, with wild panning and delirious FX suggesting a sound clash on a distant planet. Meanwhile the arcade exuberance, vocoder gospel and space age ballads predate the sweltering synth-pop of The Knife, Hot Chip and Ariel Pink by a full two decades, setting a bar that their successors still fail to meet. Even if you expect the unexpected, there’s still room for one looney tune to take you by surprise as the jazzy “Farewell Goodbye” sinks the Cole Porter songbook in the nearest wormhole. Innovative, experimental yet still heavy on the hooks, ‘Metaluna’ is both a jubilant expression of its creators’ tastes and a masterclass in mercurial pop - a success of self-expression which proves once again that the best bands play for themselves.

[engl] After introducing us to the techno-tropical pop of Supersempfft via an essential reissue of their stargazing sophomore LP ‘Metaluna’, those surefooted folks at Hamburg’s Bureau B beam back a couple of years to bring us the Hessen outfit’s outrageous debut. The collaborative vehicle careers through the cosmos like a high performance clown car, disguising daring chord progressions, technical innovation and a heap of hooks behind its cartoon chassis, and taking us lucky listeners along for the joyride. ++++++++++++ Operating at the unlikely nexus between creative studio and sixth form common room, and fusing all the expertise of the former with commercial disinterest of the latter, Supersempfft served as the multidisciplinary moniker for a trio of childhood friends whose separate skills combined perfectly for their high-concept high jinks. The prodigious musical talent of Dieter Kolb, augmented and elevated by Franz Knüttel’s electronic innovation, provided the ideal medium for Franz Aumüller’s wacky world building, which made up the lyrical thrust and visual flair of the project. ‘Roboterwerke’, both the name of this 1979 LP and the revolutionary drum machine created by Knüttel, tells the story of a mellow tuba-toting frog (apparently an avatar of Kolb), who is technologically transformed by a mad scientist (a Professor Knüttels, as it happens) into a star surfing superhero. So far, so far out - especially considering the lurid, lysergic lunacy of the comic book cover art – but this slapstick silliness also serves as sleight of hand, a daft disguise to keep these sublime sounds away from the squares. The titular opener offers an astral ascent, its cinematic sequences sweeping between Berlin School technique and an electronic apache, setting the scene in a galaxy far far away. It’s always cocktail hour somewhere in the cosmos, and “We Found Out” finds our heroes lounging on a Venusian beach, tapping their toes to a bobbing bassline and indulging in interplanetary exotica ideally zoot-suited for the YMO crowd. Supersempfft serve their third style in as many songs with two-part tone poem “Fantasia & Pipedreams On A Lilypad”, a pastoral idyll which echoes gently across a lake. Anchored by Ali Schadeberg’s lyrical acoustic fretwork, the piece drifts between the softer fringes of prog and the psychedelic folk of Shuggie Otis, celebrating amphibian autonomy on a sunny day. This calm comes to an abrupt end via the hydraulic funk of “Let’s Beam Him Up”, an oddball pop masterpiece turbo-powered by the wild and wonky rhythms of Roboterwerke. Frazzled circuitry fizzes and pops beneath an exuberant vocoder before the pitch shifted soul vocals push the big red button marked anthem. The B-side opens with the widescreen synth-pop of “I’m Gonna Make You Big”, a sky-scraping combination of rubberised bass, electronic gurgle, and open-hearted croon which makes the following year’s ‘McCartney II’ sound ordinary. Its modulating vocals soon segue into the seesawing sequences and rolling robo-funk of “Be A Man You Frog”, a digital dreamscape that gradually unspools into the heart of a wormhole. Giddy and glorious, space age calypso “Supersempfft” foreshadows the group’s follow-up LP, while “Out Of Time” is a delirious disco hustle about intergalactic flight on a giant butterfly. All of which leads to the tuba-infused “The Best Thing Is To Get High”, an impish ode to altered states that brings this journey to a perfectly playful close. Don’t be misled, there’s no amount of sensory boosts, terrestrial or otherwise, which can compete with the creative talent oozing through these grooves.

[engl] Renowned acid cosmologist Johannes Auvinen, best known by his alias Tin Man, leaves the club floor behind for a full-length kosmische excursion on Bureau B. Since his first Tin Man records nearly 20 years ago, Auvinen has impelled acid—in the grand tradition of Phuture and co.—into shapes and forms heretofore uncharted. He does it again on his latest, "Arles," exploring a new realm of impressionistic beauty where pristine, heartfelt melodies dance delicately atop austere motorik rhythms. It's a trip you'll want to take again and again. "Cosmic," as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means "of or relating to the cosmos, the extraterrestrial vastness," or "relating to abstract spiritual or metaphysical ideas." In that light, the first record by Tin Man, aka Johannes Auvinen, on Bureau B is cosmic indeed— kosmische, if you will. Auvinen is best known for his manifold expressions of acid, in the house and techno sense, that pull your heartstrings as they move your feet. But on "Arles," he leaves his dance floor bonafides behind for an album-length journey through inner and outer space. Although "Arles" isn't built for the club, it's unmistakably a Tin Man record, through and through. (Fret not: adventurous DJs will find much to work with here, naturally.) Auvinen's tender melodies, coaxed from an array of gear including his signature Roland TB-303, dance delicately atop minimal, propulsive rhythms. The form is different, but the fundament remains the same. In the manner of its namesake city, "Arles" is a portrait of impressionistic beauty. One might call it a turning point for Auvinen, a new direction, but like Auvinen's best work elsewhere, "Arles" is disarming in its unveiled simplicity. There is no artifice here; this album has nothing to prove, no need to convince the listener of anything. Its elegance is accessible immediately, its grace given freely. And after the record's done, chances are you'll find yourself dropping the needle right back at the beginning. Each listen reveals a new tenor—each track becomes a new favorite. It's a trip you'll want to take again and again.

[engl] Without a doubt, To Rococo Rot are an exception within the German music landscape. From 1995 until they broke up in 2014, the group around Robert Lippok, Ronald Lippok and Stefan Schneider researched a unique sound between electronic music, ambient, post-melancholy and the further development of a new, free music like krautrock. Pitchfork described their sound as "unmistakably digital, yet 100% human". With releases on labels such as Kitty-Yo, City Slang and Mute Records as well as concerts worldwide, the band has built a remarkable reputation. The trio was invited three times by John Peel to record radio sessions in the BBC studios. Bureau B is pleased to make the recordings from these three sessions from the years 1997 and 1999 available on record for the first time, which, in addition to the live versions of selected album tracks, also contains exclusive, unreleased songs.

[engl] Parisian-by-choice Detlef Weinrich aka Tolouse Low Trax turns the page again. Always willing for a new episode, notion, impulse, idea, ideal. Searching for some light out there. Now Kiosque Versions, a compilation compiled by himself, featuring seven edits by friends and treasured artists. They renew some rare TLT tunes, as well as hits, that never took the charts by storm. There is French legend and Tigersushi boss Joakim, edging the TLT winner Rushing Into Water from 2016. A guarded stepper, dancy, trippy, with an enchantress on his shoulder, that haunts your body and soul. The 2020 TLT tune Dawn Is Temporal, taken from his album Jumping Dead Leafs, comes as an old school hip hop leaning track, re-fashioned by New York’s Beat Detectives, including Amen-Break and nod-your-head vibes. Producer Ido Plumes from Bristol took Tristeros Empire home and worked it club-wise. A nervous beating modification, Detroit machines, motorway funk, cosmic gasps - pure driller killer. Glasgow's Dip Friso stays tense too. Echoes, tribal bounce, manic loops. Another driller in dub heaven. Like Paris based digi-dub explorers Froid Dub, who bring a great wave of warm grooves, making baroque-esk dub friends with Make Friends, a TLT track from his legendary three Volume strong 2016 Antinote sampler compendium. Their fellow countryman Simo Cell nervously metamorphoses A Song and a Photo Novella, a TLT soundtrack for a film by artist Nicolàs Guagnini. His version has all that bass, vibrates on an experimental subconsciousness, and aims the dancefloor with a stirring bouquet of rhythmic ideas. The dot on the I comes from TLT himself, remixing his very own music, translating the Gamelan melancholy of Subghosts, a tune from his 2010 debut album Mask Talk, into today, refined with dubby upsetting notes, a speed lift, and a very playful TLT groove. Let's turn the page.

[engl] With "Leave Me Alone", Detlef Weinrich presents his fifth album under the moniker Tolouse Low Trax. Weinrich, who has meanwhile turned his back on Düsseldorf and lives in Paris, has long since ceased to be an insider tip and is a guest in renowned clubs and festivals all over Europe. With his new album, he succeeds in an exciting, unforeseen new direction. The velvety heaviness and rawness of earlier records seems to have given way to a new playfulness. A playfulness perhaps in the sense of an electronica reminiscent of the late 1990s, which in its idea of deconstruction and reduction is currently enjoying a new appreciation in the clubs. But also in the sense of an urban vibe of hip hop and dub references, which are woven into a very unique mix in Weinrich's tracks.

[engl] Christoph Dallach, Andreas Dorau and Daniel Jahn present Echo Neuklang, a compilation which explores the question of how Krautrock has influenced generation after generation of musicians since its inception. A contentious genre at the best of times, the music within its spectrum is essentially intangible. The common thread running through it is a compulsion to seek out the new. Beginning in the year 1981 and extending as far as 2023, the music in this collection demonstrates how the idea of what passed for Krautrock in the 1970s has been interpreted or reinterpreted by a diverse array of artists with distinct approaches in the decades which followed, without recourse to any generic conventions.

[engl] Do not adjust your sets. Take a step back from the tracking. This is the sound of Germany's musical youth let loose on cheap synths and pawnshop guitars. A record of a disparate scene of squat pop-stars, art-school upstarts and committed non-musicians who redefined German music in the first half of the 1980s.

[engl] For their second foray into the fringes of German pop, Bureau B delve deeper than before, raiding cassette culture, 7" obscurities and overlooked album cuts to further frame this free-thinking strain of sonic expression. Starting the count from punk’s year zero, this set sees a newly liberated generation get weird and wild with anything they could lay their hands on, delivering demented, detuned and disorienting tracks brimming with DIY spirit. Where their kosmische predecessors preferred immersive, expansive compositions, these artists opted for immediacy, quickly capturing one idea before moving on to the next. Exploiting advances in home recording to say outside of industry confines, these art-school extroverts and commune drop outs often came together in unplanned collaborations and one off projects, capturing their whole creative lifespan on one side of a C45. As such, there’s a youthful charm to the sounds found on this compilation – an infectious combination of energy, expression and naivety running though each unlikely melody. This shift in approach and outlook even informed established acts, as evidenced by the perverse pop curiosities from Cluster and Moebius & Beerbohm lurking on the line up beside unreleased and unremembered gems from the likes of Maria Zerfall and E.M.P. Once again those expert selectors at Bureau B have done the hard work, digging deep to deliver a disparate, different and dissident side of German Pop Music. All you have to do is press play. The sparse drum machine of ALU’s »Aludome« opens proceedings, laying the foundation for wavy guitar chords and simple melodies on this tender 1980 composition, which only came to light in 2005. From there we sink into the watery electronics, free jazz bass and abstract guitars of Detlef Diederichsen charmingly abrupt »Pissnelke 2000«, before Maria Zerfall moves us into the shadows with the dark and punkish dirge »Der Mond«, a haunting track with double tracked and distorted spoken vocals. Butzmann / Kapielski’s avant-dance masterpiece »Do The VoPo« diverts us to the dance-floor, where the oddball synth sounds and skewed sampler vox of Rüdiger Lorenz’ »Francis & Friends« traps us in a strange slow motion groove. The tempo raises via E.M.P.’s dubbish sabotage of 80s smooth jazz, turns inside out on Vono’s charming interlude “Der Zauberer”, then finds its feet again via Reichmann’s ’78 composition »Wunderbar« taken from the Sky LP of the same name. This frazzled fusion of cosmic country and Asiatic melody shares a widescreen worldview with Deux Baleines Blanches’ »Draht 9«, on which post punk electronics and chiming guitars combine with bittersweet beauty. The time-travelling Rolf Trostel takes us to the midpoint with pulsating chords which predate Basic Channel by a decade, while Phantom Band’s »Dream Machine« stitches together two decades of the psychedelic continuum in a riot of tumbling toms, panning sequences and brain melting waveforms. »Glucose« sees Moebius & Beerbohm unleash their strange music at a delinquent tempo, before Jimmy, Jenny + Jonny offer a second subversion of smooth jazz with their skronking Mediterranean fantasy »Salome«. Thomas Dinger’s frosty music box romance »Alleewalzer« and The Wirtschaftswunder’s stomping ska-like »Television« follow in quick succession, leading us into Cluster’s narcotic fairground »Oh Odessa«, a queasy assemblage of detuned FM bells and percussive piston bursts. From there, the dubbed out post punk of Sprung Aus Den Wolken, experimental dance of Notorische Reflexe and unhinged disco of Günter Schickert capture different ends of the alternative dance floor, before the pastoral outsider pop of Lapre’s »Septer« signs off in a swell of yearning melody.

[engl] Over the last ten years a strange mycelium was sprouting from the ground of Germany’s sound topography, going widely unnoticed while creeping its way up through the copse of the ubiquitous “Neo-Kraut”, “Diskurs-Pop” and the like. We’re talking about a small underground network of artists and projects with poetic, mysterious names such as Brannten Schnüre, Baldruin, Kirschstein, Freundliche Kreisel and Balint Brösel. Operating in the margins and intersections of folklore, experimental electronics, dreams and nightmares, the “Gespensterland” LP archives and compiles their magic works for the very first time and already today it stands as a contemporary testament with an auratic presence comparable to that of Pordenone’s “Great Complotto”. “Deutschland – Gespensterland”: they’re lurking in each and every crack of a brittle reality, amongst the concrete of apartment blocks and motorway bridges, twixt and tween the shopping mall and the leisure park, they’re floating along gap sites and post-war facades, apricating in the ludicrous snobbery of Germany’s suburbia, whispering from behind crammed sheds in a labyrinth of allotments. Gossamer ghosts spun from daily rituals, spectres of a mundane here and now, that suffuse the land with an invisible veiling. Hardly ever have their frequencies been transmitted as unadulterated as on this record. Much like the fever dream imagery of gothic novels and early horror flicks has equipped our senses with a new perception of reality itself, Gespensterland’s surreal songs and oblique sound textures yield an array of microscopic reflections and deeper insights into the psychogeography of the land. Raised in Lower Franconia, both Baldruin and Brannten Schnüre already have a considerable discography under their belt. A string of vinyl and cassette releases issued in lovingly designed small runs contributed to their underground fame, securing them a distinguished but growing cult following, especially abroad. Due to their rather brief or latent existence, the legacy of Balint Brösel and Kirschstein, hailing from the Ruhr area, however is of a more obscure nature. Hence, it’s all the more important that their fascinating and idiosyncratic skein of ghost musick is being documented here as well, emerging like a seldom ore that slumbered too long inside the earth, having accumulated the collective dreams of generations of necromancers. Ghosts stories, both uncanny and hilarious, are likewise the main ingredient of Freundliche Kreisel’s songs, a joint project of Brannten Schnüre and Baldruin, and as with all material on this record these tracks have been unreleased to date. For as much as these bands differ in their respective sonic approach, “Gespensterland” can still be considered as a cipher for a shared cosmos and a mutually found aesthetic language. It is always a similar sentiment of a slightly disconnected, shifted and delayed reality that manifests itself in Brannten Schnüre’s wistful and whimsical ambient-folk loops, the evocative and rhythmic poltergeist interludes of Baldruin, the sweet and naïve C86- jangle of Balint Brösel, Kirschstein’s rhenish mutant-NDW and post-kraut-romanticism and the electro-acoustic séances of Freundliche Kreisel. Think of it as a rampant yearning, a manic laughter, but mostly as a feeling of some somnambulistic thirst for adventure and journeys into the unknown, a feeling that is grounded deep inside the heart of the continent. We imagine, this is the music of a few like-minded recluses, sitting alone at night in their chambers, immersing themselves in the darkest and innermost Tibet of their own work. It’s not too far-fetched either to read “Gespensterland” as a contribution to a specifically German response to Mark Fisher’s hauntologic theories. In every track, the fancy of an abandoned future uncoils a narrative thread that has long been discontinued, a dream vision that remained unredeemed forever, now haunting the dull grey corridors of the post- historic presence. These songs glimmer and shine with moods and stories that draw their tension from the same force fields that once gave rise to Alfred Kubin’s demonic visions, Hans Henny Jahnn’s nightmarish “Night of Lead” or the bizarre adventures of Baron Muenchhausen. And yet, it is not the spectres of the past that are being summoned or dealt with here, but instead the quotidian, perpetually recurring disintegration of reality that lies within the close encounter with one’s own unfamiliarity: “is this my hand, or is it someone else’s?”. Margot Benetti, Walpurgis 2023