[engl] If I told you the career-spanning collection of Halle, German’s drum and bass duo Battra//, 2014-2017, began with a sample of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, you might not believe me. Or, in the worst of all potential reactions, it might turn you off to listening to it in general. But then you’d miss out on some truly face-melting powerviolence, and I don’t want that for you. (SPIN)

[engl] All the herbs have been smoked. Datashock deliver a new album: “Geltungsbereich Universum”. Their second for Bureau B and the eighth in a career as an internationally active collective of musicians which has spanned two decades (so far). Space is the place, as the moonstruck sparrows sing from the rooftops, or is the Earth the most beautiful place in the universe? Some say yes, others no. Datashock say nothing at all. Twenty years and counting, and yet here they are, as shoulder-shruggingly nonchalant as ever, in the environs of pop culture, where (seeing) the wood for the trees means the world. What’s going down, what’s not? What the heck! Is this still krautrock, is it space rock or experimental music? What’s the difference? Does it even matter? What’s important is that something is happening. This much we know. And now something else has happened. A new Datashock release: Geltungsbereich Universum. Of course, it couldn’t be any other way. Why set themselves limits? That has never been a concern for them. Even if, in all likelihood, they don’t make it into space, at least not this year, they have been most places and always stick to their own thing. Which is what, exactly? That’s for others to decide. The critique? This is your captain speaking, … your captain is dead. Use your ears. Listen closely and take your time to discover the musical spheres – the infinite worlds – of Datashock. For card-carrying space travellers only!

[engl] Der Plan (Moritz R®, Frank Fenstermacher, Pyrolator) were instrumental in ushering in the German New Wave (NDW) and are considered free spirits of synthesizer pop: electronic music created with minimal means, sometimes experimental, playful or even bordering on dilettantism, but always with a sense of humour. "Die letzte Rache" (The Last Revenge) was the soundtrack to the cult film of the same name by Rainer Kirberg – and at the same time a varied and thoroughly entertaining journey to the musical world of Der Plan.

[engl] A cynic might propound the notion that to reissue an album entitled „Es ist eine fremde und seltsame Welt” at this particular moment would be to hit the nail on the head with painful exactitude. No cynics here, however, only music lovers.

[engl] Der Plan (Moritz R®, Frank Fenstermacher, Pyrolator) are seen as key pioneers of the German New Wave (Neue Deutsche Welle). They revolutionized synthesizer pop on their debut album "Geri Reig" (1980): produced with minimal means, at times experimental electronic music, playful bordering on dilettantish, and always with a sense of humour. Brothers in the spirit of The Residents, but more radical. File under: Synthiepop from outer space.

[engl] Shrouded in myth, ‘Save Your Software’ is the long-lost album by Der Plan. Back in the mid-1980s, Moritz Reichelt, Kurt Dahlke (Pyrolator) and Frank Fenstermacher initiated the Fanuks project with the aim of making themselves immortal as Mensch-Maschinen or Man-Machines. “Fanuks” would produce music for all eternity, embarking on a never-ending world tour. Eternity would ultimately prove to be out of their reach due to various technical hurdles, but it is fair to say that Der Plan were always way ahead of their time. By the end of the decade, the Fanuks, or their respective human alter egos, had crafted six pieces. These were only rediscovered in 2020 during a thorough inspection of the Ata Tak/ Der Plan archives. Reichelt, Dahlke and Fenstermacher augmented their six visionary masterpieces with three tracks based on compositions from the year 1989. Now it works at least a little with eternity, even if ‘only’ in the form of the legendary productions that have finally been made available to the public.

[engl] This first Bureau B retrospective devoted to Die Welttraumforscher covers the Swiss project's early creative period from 1981 to 1990. The eccentric, heartwarming pop songs now sound like documents from a parallel world, interwoven with idiosyncratic fantasy, surreal stories and dreamlike apparitions. All tracks have been remastered and the artwork has been lovingly crafted with the original Forscher drawings.

[engl] When the Welttraumforscher (world dream explorer) started their journey on July 14, 1981, it was not foreseeable that it would last so long. For over 40 years now, Christian Pfluger from Zurich has been working with drawings, texts and songs on the idiosyncratic and fascinating universe of the imaginary trio. This has resulted in numerous cassettes, LP and CD releases. Most recently, a two-part retrospective was released in the spring of 2021 on Hamburg's Bureau B, giving an insight into the wonderfully rapturous dream world of the project, which despite the continuous work remains something of an insider tip to this day. With their new collection "Liederbuch", which will be released in August, the Welttraumforscher are going on tour for the first time in many years. When the Welttraumforscher open their songbook, they are met, as in a pop-up book, by the fictional friends they have invented and sung to on their journey through 40 years: the captain to the soul Kip Eulenmeister (the owl master) and the crop circle researcher (iguana) Leguan Rätselmann, the insect twins Brtz and Brxl, the space travelers Lia and Mira from the Nordkristall (northern crystal), Ohm Olunde from the silent forests and the incredible dark pilots. In their distant worldroom, the two insect beings Brtz and Brxl open up the Welttraumforscher songbook. They find the songs, from A to O, sung by the Forscher on their albums dating back to the faraway year of 1981 – on cassettes, vinyls, CDs and through digital communications kaleidoscopes. It’s Sunday and, with plenty of downtime on their hands, Brtz and Brxl listen to all the songs; the one about the yellow wight in the moors, the one about Kip Eulenmeister, the Captain of Souls, one about Leguan Rätselmann, pursuing every riddle, and one about the dark things which sometimes happen around midnight. We want one too, say say Brtz and Brxl, a songbook of our own, all the songs we like to listen to the most, collected in one album. By now it is late on Sunday evening and the moon shines above them like a colourful paper lantern. The two insect beings ponder: what shall we call our songbook? The very name we gave it, songbook. So here it is and this is what it sounds like – Brtz and Brxl wish you happy listening. As do the Welttraumforscher, whose quiet body of work turned out so well. So without further ado: welcome! Welcome to the Welttraumforscher songbook!

[engl] The second collection sees Bureau B zoom in on the years 1992 to 2012 in the Welttraumforscher universe. A more pensive atmosphere of melancholy pervades the tracks documented herein, as if the more spherical musical journeys and expeditions undertaken by creator and sole member Christian Pfluger lead to increasingly enchanted worlds.

[engl] new album!

[engl] Im April 2007 ist „Handbuch für die Welt“, das vielleicht beste Fehlfarben-Album seit „Monarchie und Alltag“, erschienen. Bei Tapete Records erscheint dieses Meisterwerk am 15. September – erstmals auch auf Vinyl – als Wiederveröffentlichung.

[engl] The author Max Goldt is well known to the general public. Not so the musician Max Goldt, who came across the guitarist and songwriter Gerd Pasemann through a classified ad in 1978. Their joint collaboration in the 1980s resulted in the musically contrasting project Foyer des Arts: "Melancholic, sometimes resigned tracks alternated as a matter of course with comic and surreal ones," wrote Max Goldt in the booklet to his CD box set "Draußen die herrliche Sonne". John Peel liked Foyer des Arts so much that he not only played all the songs from the album "Die Unfähigkeit zu Frühstücken" several times on his show, he also invited the duo to record a session and were one of only a few few German-speaking bands to do so. In 1986, after a two-year delay, Foyer des Arts released their sophomore album Die Unfähigkeit zu Frühstücken. BBC Radio DJ John Peel liked it so much, he featured one track after another on his show. Gerd Pasemann and Max Goldt were ultimately invited to record a (John) Peel Session, a rare and distinguished honour for a German-speaking band. The Berlin duo made their way to London in October 1986, where they were joined by three members of The Higsons, an energetic combo with plenty of experience as session musicians. Indeed, they only needed one rehearsal to learn the four songs that Foyer des Arts brought with them, two from the aforementioned album and two brand new tunes : “Könnten Bienen fliegen” and “Frauen in Frieden und Freiheit”. Recording took place the following afternoon in the legendary Maida Vale Studio 4, the regular home for the Peel Sessions. “The musicians were excellent and the atmosphere was really relaxed,” Max Goldt recalls, “and afterwards we met John Peel in his favourite pub, The Vine Bar.” In the year 2000 Goldt asked the BBC what had happened to the session tapes, only to learn that they had probably been wiped. This was not a huge surprise, as the BBC archives were notoriously unreliable. Entire Dusty Springfield shows disappeared, apparently deleted. Twenty years later, the Cologne-based sound engineer Tom Morgenstern, with the help of a colleague from the BBC, managed to unearth the lost tapes. And here they are, 35 years on, as fresh as the day they were made.

[engl] In 1984, four years after the release of my first solo album SYNTHESIST on SKY Records, I wanted to produce a new solo album. At the time I was operating on the fifth floor of a former backyard factory on Graefe-Str. in Berlin Kreuzberg with my Neue Deutsche Welle Band LILLI BERLIN. We'd turned the space into a small music and rehearsal studio where we set up a TASCAM 8-track tape recorder, a 12- channel MM mixer that roared like hell, a Mini-Moog and a ROLAND Jupiter-6 synthesizer. This is where the basic recordings for OCEANHEART were made. Essentially sequences and chords, which I then added piano, drums, Indian tablas and solo voices to in Christoph Franke's (Tangerine Dream) studio in Berlin Spandau. It was then mastered on a BETAMAX video recorder - at that time the non-plus-ultra of modern stereo recording technique. Oceanheart was released on SKY Records in 1985. At the beginning of 2022 Gunther Buskies, owner of BUREAU B label, had the inspired idea to expand the planned re-release of OCEANHEART with a remix album on double vinyl and CD and to call it OCEANHEART REVISITED. Around the same time I met Tobias Stock through my friend Chris Mick. Tobias, a qualified electronics engineer and musician, had put together a complex, top-class analog studio over 20 years of meticulous and passionate collecting - bringing each of the numerous component parts back into the best technical state with his own hands. There are only few studios of this kind and quality in the world and it was here, in his 'On TAPE’ Studio, we created the analogue mixes of OCEANHEART REVISITED on a NAGRA 2-channel tape machine. I really enjoyed working on OCEANHEART REVISITED and I'd like to share this experiment with you. Harald Grosskopf, January 2023

[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] With "Ein Bündel Fäulnis in der Grube", Holger Hiller presented his solo debut having left Palais Schaumburg. Originally released in 1983 on the Düsseldorf scene label Ata Tak, an international release followed in 1984 via Cherry Red Records. Combining electronic sequencer sounds and sampling fragments with unconventional lyrics its multidisciplinary approach locates it somewhere between the pop and avant-garde. Bureau B is now making the work accessible again on its 40th anniversary. In 1983, during the completion of this album, some ideas and views of the future changed for me. While everyone's mind was still haunted by the admonishingly gloomy vision of George Orwell's "1984", the release of the motion picture "Blade Runner" had a lasting effect. It depicted a world that can no longer be saved: Acid rain is pouring down derelict buildings and humanity has to confront fugitive cyborgs as a result of artificial intelligence gone wrong. The future however was not quite so clear-cut as those pictures: dystopian imaginings were also being layered with mosaic pieces of a pop history that saw itself as a source of hope, a supposed counterculture. Could this promise be fulfilled or was it simply a "productive misunderstanding"?? ? With the onset of digitalisation the new musical tools - first and foremost the techniques of "sampling" and computerised sequencing - were enthusiastically met by me and many others, a generation of William Burroughs readers whose sensibility had been nurtured by "cut-up" and "automatic writing".? ? And so everything flowed together on this album: the esoteric heritage of various hippie and alternative movements and their expressions in "Pop", the underlying currents of "Modernism" and the influences of European "Neue Musik". The resulting musical pieces on the album celebrate this moment in its simultaneity, its confusion and its new confidence.

[engl] German Punk and Neue Deutsche Welle (New wave) band from Hannover, Germany.

[engl] Remastered and sounding better than ever, ‘Compiled 2.0 / 1981-84’ wraps up the most indispensible bits by Gudrun Gut and co’s all-female German post-punk unit Malaria! - effectively Berlin’s answer to The Slits or The Raincoats and one of the key Neue Deutsche Welle and post-punk units of the era. Staking a ground zero for Berlin post-punk, Malaria!’s music was a product of the West side of the city’s scuzzy aesthetics and progressive politics. Gathering the powers of co-founders Gudrun Gut and Bettina Koster, plus Christine Hahn, Manon P. Duursma and Susanne Kuhnke, Malaria! hit the ground running with their eponymous debut 12” and soon after a support slot for New Order at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, leading them to tour venues across the world and become one of Berlin’s most distinctive and influential bands. This comp spans Malaria!’s vital early years when their sound emerged as a mix of driving punk that veered from No Wave and NDW to skronky, dubbed out disco-punk mutations. Notably including material recorded at Studio Christoph Franke, the legendary Berlin facility behind classics by Tangerine Dream, the results have withstood the test of time thanks to the band’s mix of direct, experimental yet disciplined rawness and studio magick. From that debut 12” you’ll find the martial swagger and honk of ‘Kämpfen Und Siegen’, and the wilder patchwork dub collage of ‘Dabo’ recalling Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Gray from the same era. Also from 1981, ‘How Do You Like My New Dog?’ is a killer bit of electroid deathrock scuzz, while ‘Pernod’ feels out a jazzy sorta No Wave sound akin to James Chance and The Contortions, and the rudely discordant, nerve-jangle disco-not-disco jagz of ‘Zarah’, ‘Geh Dischen’ and the sly pop brilliance of ‘Your Turn To Run’ cement the NYC connection in recordings made at the city’s Sorcerer Sound.