[engl] You don't really need to say much about this man: co-founder of Wallenstein, drummer on at least two of the most wonderful Krautrock albums (namely "Mother Universe" and "Cosmic Century"), member of the legendary "Kosmische Kuriere", records with Ash Ra Temple and Klaus Schulze. Finally, Harald Grosskopf switched from drums to sequencers and created something breathtaking. I listened to his solo debut Synthesist (1980) to death, and few days began without "So weit, so gut". It was a record that did everything right, that salvaged whatever could be salvaged from Kraut, adding the melancholy with which one suddenly looked back on everything that could still be naively believed and played in the 70s. Then in 1985 came the follow-up Oceanheart, no less great, albeit already noticeably more minimalist. Manuel Göttsching could be sensed in the distance if you surrendered to the track "Eve on the Hill" and followed it into the depths. Time passed, the music stayed with me. I lost sight of Harald Grosskopf, even though he did produce an album from time to time. And now: "Strom". The evocation of electricity, the virtuosity of the circuit that skillfully intertwines man and machine, an antidote to the triumphal march of desolate musical digitality. If you listen carefully, you will immediately recognize the engineer behind the soundscapes. Right from the opener "Bureau 39", everything you would expect from Grosskopf is immediately there: the push toward hypnosis, a subdued pulse, catchy, circling bass lines, layering Moog kaleidoscopes. Sometimes the sounds coarsen, the depths distort into grinding noises (as in "Blow"), into mechanical gurgling, i.e. into what remains when the path comes to an end, when the music reaches beyond the human. The mid-tempo track with the programmatic title "After the Future", grotesquely twisting the word “never", points the way there. Time and again, however, the beat pauses, leaving space for the soundscapes - and then, at the latest, the electronica of the early 80s springs back to life. The two complementary pieces "Gleich Strom" and "Spaeter Strom" would also fit in wonderfully on Synthesist. On the other hand, the closing track "Stromklang" remains resolutely committed to the sinister, even gloomy groove that was previously unknown from this artist and with which he has finally returned to me after far too long. Stylo Kraut indeed. Philipp Theisohn

[engl] The inspiration for 'Album I' and 'Album II' began with a performance by Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi at Cologne's Week-End Fest in 2019. For this appearance the renowned experimental musician and composer of the Oscar-winning film „Drive My Car" was joined on drums by Tatsuhisa Yamamoto and Joe Talia; both integral members of the top-level improvisational/ experimental scene in Tokyo. While in town for the festival, Ishibashi met up with the members of the Cologne-Berlin based group Von Spar who featured Ishibashi on their then new album "Under Pressure".

[engl] The inspiration for 'Album I' and 'Album II' began with a performance by Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi at Cologne's Week-End Fest in 2019. For this appearance the renowned experimental musician and composer of the Oscar-winning film „Drive My Car" was joined on drums by Tatsuhisa Yamamoto and Joe Talia; both integral members of the top-level improvisational/ experimental scene in Tokyo. While in town for the festival, Ishibashi met up with the members of the Cologne-Berlin based group Von Spar who featured Ishibashi on their then new album "Under Pressure".

[engl] Six years after Italian rock 'n' roll band The Peawees gave us their critically acclaimed album “Moving Target,” they’ve finally returned with their 7th studio album, “One Ride.” It's been a long wait, one that includes line-up changes, divorces, lost loved ones, job troubles - whatever hardship was thrown at The Peawees, “One Ride” makes it clear that it only made them stronger. This album seethes with the rock 'n' roll swagger of a bygone era, and the band shows the rare ability to wear their influences on their sleeves with a sound that feels unique. The mix of rock 'n' roll, soul, punk, and garage spins on the record like it came straight out of a blender: one part The Sonics, one part Link Wray, two parts The Clash, a splash of Stax shaken over Phil Spector and served like it was thrown straight in your face. Approaching their 30-year mark, the band continues to defy convention and write their own epic on the vast canvas of contemporary rock 'n' roll. "One Ride" is "a true showcase for the criminally underrated songwriting talents of Hervé Peroncini." Once more, The Peawees do not disappoint: as the saying goes…all killers, no fillers. Reflecting on the album's journey, drummer Tommy Gonzalez shares, “We started working on 'One Ride' in 2019. We even recorded the title track then. We were riding the wave of ‘Moving Target,’ touring, playing festivals, and had planned to have an album ready for 2022 at the latest. We thought we would record a few songs, go on tour, record a few more, and continue like that until we had a full-length album. Of course, everything got messed up when Covid hit: no possibility to practice together and Hervé was stuck abroad on an island." Frontman/songwriter Hervé Peroncini adds, "We were coming off a beautiful and exhausting year of gigs and tours, and in the meantime, I had written some new material. We all agreed that we should start recording a new record until all that shit broke out just as I was due to return from the island I was supposed to be on for only a short period of time. Although it was a nice place to get stuck, I was still in a two-tiny-room apartment with nothing to do, and after managing to get a guitar, I started recording some stuff on my phone and sending the recordings to the guys. In the end, I stayed on the island for 6 months and wrote three-quarters of the album there. Fortunately, the restrictions were not so strict there, so after a short time, I had the opportunity to go out, see friends, and hear bizarre stories of various kinds - all things that in some way stimulated me to write." The isolation and the unexpected surroundings became fertile ground for creativity, turning adversity into an advantage. The unique circumstances under which "One Ride" was conceived added a layer of raw authenticity to the album. Stories of outsiders, dreamlike lyrics that drag you into nocturnal situations, a sick love, frustration, indecision, resignation, and moments of crazy euphoria suck you into the grooves of a record that exudes rock 'n' roll in every aspect. Tommy Gonzalez continues: "We tried to make demos from a distance. I remember programming a drum beat on some computer app for 'She Cries as She Kills' and sending it to Hervé. It was such a pain in the ass and so unfulfilling to go from hitting the drums to hitting the keyboards, but it was the only way we could keep going. When we finally got the chance to start playing again, we dove back into it as hard as we could." Hervé adds, "Yeah, when we got back on track, our long-time guitar player Carlo Landini told us he was moving to Berlin. So when Dario took his place, we thought it would be essential to play and tour as much as we could to break in the new lineup both musically and on a personal level, and when we realized everything was going smoothly, we finally entered the studio!"

[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] 20 Shades of Province Around 1981, provincial Germany was an excellent breeding ground for abstruse concepts such as those of Autofick (an offshoot of the group Zimt), whose training cassette Pogo: Ein Praktischer Leitfaden included sound examples such as the song "Eiscafé”, which contains a compact analysis of youth in Tübingen and is the third best German punk song. Carambolage, on the other hand, made music in Ton Steine Scherben’s North Frisian band commune that didn’t sound like Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW - meaning New German Wave), but more like obscure British DIY bands, for whom punk simply meant the downward redistribution of pop culture. At the same time, a handful of musicians in Limburg an der Lahn founded a couple of bands, which Alfred Hilsberg brought to the people as “Limburger Pest", a record package consisting of singles by The Wirtschaftswunder and Die Radierer and the flexidisc "Wo ist der Dom?" by Siluetes 61, a project by Tom Dokupil (who was also in all the other bands), which (like "Bauernlife" by The Wirtschaftswunder) processed life in the cathedral city with its invisible cathedral into a lively anti-art song. Hanover, on the other hand, was large enough to have a proper punk scene, which gradually transformed teenage rebellion into an eternal stag party against an end-time backdrop, which Hans-A-Plast could not miss recording for posterity as early as 1981. The fact that the only queer hits in the otherwise largely heteronormative scene - "Tagebuch" by Bärchen und Die Milchbubis and "Samen im Darm" by the Cretins - emerged in Hanover of all places is one of those likeable contradictions that characterize the early phase of punk. Ziggy XY nevertheless turned his back on the city, and the unwieldy strangeness of his project Kosmonautentraum can certainly be understood as an objection to the unambiguousness of the dawning “Deutschpunk”. The second LP (with the anti-hit "Abschied") at latest caught up with Holger Hiller, who in turn pushed NDW avant-garde to the point of high cultural maturity on his own records and as the singer of Palais Schaumburg. In one way or another, his records could have been created at the other end of a modernity that had not been interrupted by the Nazis. Thanks to their classical vocal training, the brothers Udo and Gerd Scheuerpflug, alias Die Zwei from Neuendettelsau in Franconia, ventured into similar realms. Their a cappella single was played by John Peel and was released on the label of the pioneering Berlin record shop Zensor, which also had a hand in the self-released single by Konstantin, with which Max Goldt and Gerd Pasemann bridged the time while they were not allowed to use the name Foyer Des Arts for contractual reasons. Düsseldorf has been studied so thoroughly that I will limit myself here to Family 5 and Male, but I don't want to withhold them because "Tagein - Tagaus" is the best lyric Peter Hein has written to date, and Male was the first "first German punk band" to produce real punk hits. Rassemenschen helfen armen Menschen stole the second best band name of the NDW from the poster of a Viennese cat-breeding exhibition (for charitable purposes) and their singles, which are quite rightly no longer to be found, are far too far out to be left out here. In Marburg (an der Lahn), Ludger Andreas alias Exo Neutrino tried to recreate Limburg conditions by recording cassettes single-handedly under crazy, changing names. His only single (as Lustige Mutanten) was actually produced in Limburg by Tom Dokupil. Just like "Tagesschau" by Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (or F.S.K.), which tried to reinvent the deadly serious media criticism popular among German left-wingers as cheerful pop criticism. Neues Deutschland from Kassel left behind only a concept album about the German-German division, on which "Muskulatur" is a little out of the ordinary, because thematically it is actually more of an F.S.K. song. And while Neue Deutsche Welle was already disappearing from the scene elsewhere, in Hamburg-Bergedorf various children got together under the guidance of Felix Kubin to play NDW underground, which led to quite fascinating misunderstandings that were distributed among friends under group names such as Die Egozentrischen 2. In the centre of Hamburg, Die Zimmermänner were already exploring the question of whether it was even possible to sing pop in German after all. The fact that the "German Pop Music" that emerged always kept its quotation marks for the sake of decency distinguishes it favorably from the dreadful German pop music that everyone feels called upon to make today.

[engl] You guessed it, Retarded are back with a new album titled "Same As The First", that literally brings back the formula of their first release. Ramones-core to the max, from Italy's Ramones-core pioneers. Produced by Mass Giorgini.

[engl] Vinyl reissue on Striped of the Travoltas classic “Endless Summer”. Hits: “One For The Road”, “Liv Tyler”, “Endless Summer”. LP + POSTER, RED VINYL

[engl] "30° Anniversary reissue of this 90s punk rock classic, remixed by Mike Kennerty and remastered by Justin Perkins. Mike Dirnt from Green Day on bass. LP + folded A3 poster. YELLOW VINYL"

[engl] LVEAM's 20th album, the sweetest of the sweetest, in a huge discography made of crazy French pop and synth punk in pure 80s, Lookout! Records and DIY spirit. Two years in the making. A futuristic and utopian bubblepunk opera about Summer, Love and Youth. In shades of purple and pink. For open-minded fanatics of Helen Love, The Queers, The Travoltas and Baltimora.

[engl] 7 years after their last album GOATHORSE we finally get another 11 songs from the Belgian punk rockers. In 2023, they celebrated their 20 years as a band, signed to Striped Records and released a 7" single (SEND IT). Both songs ("The End Is Near" b-side) re-appear on the LP. All other songs are unreleased brand new material written and recorded between 2021 and 2023.

[engl] 28 songs, featuring newly recorded versions of the bands classics and favorites + two unreleased tracks!

[engl] 3 catchy punkrock bangers, wrapped in beautiful artwork by Kaat Mondelaers.

[engl] The Odorants from Finland on Striped Records! Produced by Perry Leenhouts of the Travoltas, this a pop punk masterpiece.

[engl] Heiko Maile and Julian Demarre, both pop musicians and film composers, have been collaborating since the mid-90s album classic "MEANWHILE" by Camouflage. While Heiko continued pursuing the perfect pop song, they both landed their first feature film score gigs. In recent years while working together on several films, they felt they should create something for themselves - a love letter to 70s and 80s electronic music. With some esoteric 1970s keyboards from Japan designed for the sound of tomorrow they have now recorded an album for all the days after tomorrow. The result is the genre-bending album NEOSTALGIA, a unique blend of various electronic styles and 1970s Krautrock with pieces featuring intros/outros, flutes, flanger guitars and vocoders, and tracks pushing the six-minute mark.

[engl] US singer-songwriter legend Amy Rigby will release her new album 'Hang In There With Me' through Tapete Records on August 30, 2024. Eleven up to the minute songs written by Amy and recorded by Wreckless Eric at the couples home in upstate NY, Hang In There With Me is a bracing look at life inside the vortex of the last few years. Mortality, aging and youthful missteps refracted through Amy's insightful lyricism emerge not wistful but resolute even triumphant. Rigby's distinctive voice bluntly traverses love, loss and DIY projects gone wrong over guitars cranked or shimmering, indelible bass lines, a raft of synthesisers, keyboards, beat boxes and the occasional drummer allowed into Amy & Erics rustic mid-century echo chamber.

[engl] "Striped Records is proud to announce a Euro print of the latest SW album, ""Some Freaks Of Atavism"". SW are one of our favorite bands and SFOA is one of their best records full of soon-to-be Weasel classics, so you can guess we are very excited about this release."

[engl] Screeching Weasel arrives with their 14th studio album. This time, the kings of pop-punk pick up where they left off on their 2020 LP Some Freaks Of Atavism, leaning into themes of death, insanity and the apocalypse. An unblinking analysis of life in lockdown.

[engl] "Italy’s “Ramonecore” pioneers The Manges’’ “Book Of Hate For Good People” is their new, pop and powerful album. Produced by Andrea Manges, mixed by Andrew Berlin at The Blasting Room, mastered at Mystery Room Mastering. Includes a cover of the Fleshtones' ""I'm Not A Sissy"" and the hits ""High On Stress"" and ""Back To Bangkok"". If you're a Manges fan, you're gonna love this. The formula at his best."

[engl] "Considered by many Electric Frankenstein aficionados to be the definitive statement from the band, Listen Up Baby! was out-of-print after the demise of Man's Ruin records until TKO came along (in 2003) and not only reissued the EP, but fleshed out the original six tracks to a full-length. Technically, the material was culled from the split disc the band did with the Hookers in 1998; it has the same songs in the same order as on the original EP. The disc marked a return to the fold for original vocalist Steve Miller, and this lent a renewed enthusiasm to the band's usual, upbeat Ramones-meets-Heartbreakers-meets-Kiss couldn't-have-originated-anywhere-but-New-York retro-punk..."

[engl] The Observers are one of those punk bands that existed only in a short window of time, but left us with a game changing album. Their critically acclaimed record “So What’s Left Now” was released twenty years ago and turned a lot of heads in the underground punk and hardcore world. Deemed “Album of the Year” by reviewers at Maximum RocknRoll, Razorcake and other magazines, these ten songs changed the conversation and ushered in a new direction for the DIY scene. Their sound harkened back to the early days of American and British punk, while also offering something new. Douglas Burns and Colin Sanders formed the band in 2002. Shortly thereafter, Ian Kashani and Mike Warm joined the group. Over the next few years they toured constantly, playing mostly small clubs, basements and squats. Sadly, they called it a day in 2005 just as the band was gaining in popularity. Members of The Observers went on to play in Red Dons and Defect Defect

[engl] Formed in the East Bay back in 1993, Dead And Gone released 3 albums over a decade or so. “The Beautician” is their final (and best!) album and it finds the band at peak darkness; anti-commercial, rough-edged, perfectly controlled and terrifyingly intense. If the brooding slow burn of 80’s goth and the hyper-crawl of 90’s Neurosis gets you howling, then this nasty is tailor-made just for you. The ghosts of East Bay hardcore are re-frenzied. Get doomed, punk.

[engl] The second album from the London-based trio More Kicks, released on Dirtnap Records (USA) and Stardumb Records (Europe). The band’s self-titled debut album was a concise and ragged lesson in pop songwriting dripping in melody, cynicism and energy. ‘Punch Drunk’ marks a new era for the band. Heavier, more expansive, more twists and turns. It veers from sparkling harmonies to fearsome riffing in the blink of eye, with never a second wasted. As with the first record, it was recorded live on to 2” tape. The result: a More Kicks song can touch on classic 60s garage, 70s NYC rock and roll, jagged 90s guitar pop – all wrapped in a razor sharp bundle. A glance backwards and a decisive step forwards.