Music from Germany

Before Camouflage: teenage demo tapes, 1984-86, from synth-pop craftsman Heiko Maile. Bedroom sequencers and bright melodic hooks capture a gifted talent forming, a charming, revealing document of German synth-pop in the making.

A cornerstone of German cosmic music. Ashra and Klaus Schulze drummer Harald Grosskopf steps out solo, wedding propulsive live drums to shimmering sequencer bliss. 'Synthesist' is euphoric Berlin-school pop: melodic, driving, timeless.

A quiet meeting of minds. Roedelius and Schneider let delicate electronic and acoustic textures unfold over 'hours' of patient, meditative music: serene, spacious and gently kosmische throughout.

'Open doors'. Roedelius invites the listener into gentle, exploratory keyboard pieces, half-composed and half-dreamed. Warm, unhurried and melodically generous, the Cluster co-founder in intimate, searching mood.

'Happy moments', and it sounds it. Roedelius spins fragile, looping keyboard miniatures of great warmth and melodic grace, the gentler, sunlit side of the Cluster and Harmonia mastermind. Quietly radiant kosmische ambience.

The master of the echo-guitar, alone in the wilderness. Schickert layers cascading, delay-drenched guitar into trance-inducing krautrock ritual: hypnotic, psychedelic and deeply cosmic. Solitary genius from the Berlin underground.

Felix Kubin and percussionist Hubert Zemler as CEL: analogue synths meet live drums in taut, kinetic instrumentals. Playful and precise, kosmische energy channelled through a restless modern sensibility. Hamburg futurism, dancing.

'Ophio' pulses with widescreen, motorik grandeur. Die Wilde Jagd carry the krautrock and kosmische lineage into the present: hypnotic repetition, choral swells and cinematic build, drama drawn out over long, patient arcs.

Der Plan sharpen their cracked pop craft. 'Normalette Surprise' fizzes with cheap synths, tape trickery and gleeful absurdity, the Düsseldorf collective turning DIY electronics into surreal, catchy miniatures. Essential NDW.

Der Plan's riotous debut, a founding shot of Neue Deutsche Welle. 'Geri Reig' is anarchic, homemade electronic pop: dime-store keyboards, Dada humour and pure Ata Tak irreverence. NDW at its most inventive and unhinged.

The Ata Tak pranksters score a film. Der Plan's soundtrack to 'Die letzte Rache' is gleeful, cracked electronic pop: toy synths, absurd humour and genuine invention. The mischievous engine room of German new wave.

Schnitzler decelerates: long, hovering electronic tones and slow-turning sequences that reward patience. 'Slow Motion' is among the more meditative corners of his vast output, cold, spacious and quietly mesmerising.

The second volume of Schnitzler's cinema for the mind's eye. Sequencer motifs and alien textures sketch scene after scene of electronic drama: the restless imagination of a true pioneer, drawn from his boundless tape archive.

Imaginary soundtracks from the Kluster co-founder. 'Filmmusik 1' collects vivid electronic scenes, sinister, playful and cosmic by turns, music for films that never existed, from one of Germany's boldest sonic minds.

More from the inexhaustible archive of Berlin's electronic anarchist. Schnitzler stacks pulsing sequences and caustic tone-colours into restless, self-contained machines of sound: uncompromising, hypnotic and utterly his own.

Previously unreleased tapes from the Kluster co-founder and restless electronic pioneer. Cold, pulsing sequencer patterns and alien tone-colours map an imaginary planet: raw, hypnotic and unmistakably Schnitzler, from his vast archive.

One take, one hour, no overdubs. Moebius and Roedelius let a single improvisation unfurl in real time, gently evolving electronic tides, meditative and unforced. Late-period Cluster at its most patient and hypnotic.

Caught onstage in 1980, Cluster improvise an evening into long, mutating electronic landscapes. The duo's live telepathy in full flow, sequencers churning, textures blooming and dissolving. A vivid document of kosmische in real time.

Cluster's early-'80s farewell to their first era: shorter, gnarlier electronic vignettes, wry and rhythmic. 'Curiosum' finds Moebius and Roedelius at their most impish, sketching miniature worlds with battered analogue gear.

The abrasive, epochal debut. Moebius and Roedelius push organ, guitar and homemade electronics through banks of effects into three untitled slabs of proto-ambient drift. Year zero for German electronic music, still startling fifty years on.