Music from Germany

An absolutely great (silkscreend, tip-on style cover) reissue of Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun LP. Peter Brötzmann, tenor sax, baritone sax. Willem Breuker, tenor sax, bass clarinet. Evan Parker, tenor sax. Fred Van Hove, piano. Peter Kowald, double bass. Buschi Niebergall, double bass. Han Bennink, drums. Svenke Johansson, drums. Recorded in 1969 the music still sounds armed and dangerous.

Composed in 1970, Stockhausen's Mantra is a duet for piano written for the Donaueschingen Festival. It is Stockhausen's first completely scored piece after a long string of largely improvised compositions. Here both pianists play ring-modulated pianos, cymbals, and a wood block. One player is also controlling a recording of Morse code. The purpose of this composition was to explore the idea of a musical 'mantra.' The repetition of sounds are intended to place both the audience and the mus…

Aidan Baker's anodyne ambiences almost act as aural dream machines on their own. But now Baker has collaborated with actual film makers for his Opus Dei, embodied in this double DVD set (one credited as Aidan Baker and the other to Nadja). Clocking in at nearly 6 hours, this in-home installation is the ultimate video aquarium for the acid-minded. Baker's thrum-scapes lay back and patiently coo mantras something akin to mid-period Nocturnal Emissions or Vidna Obmana, while spectacular visions wen…

'Questions', a companion in Qluster's quiet dialogue. Roedelius and Onnen Bock spin delicate, unhurried keyboard music, more felt than composed. Intimate, spacious and gently searching ambient kosmische.

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.

A new cluster album is always full of surprises. That hasn't changed over the last 35 years. qua is written with the typical, slightly scrawly hand of cluster but, to stay within the metaphor, the musical text now is completely new. 17 rhythmic and harmonic miniatures with mysterious titles pass by the listener like a toy caravan of dark, fast camels, loaded with alien and precious drams - or is it a mere fata morgana? cluster throw flashes of light on a far but not completely foreign world; out…

LP version. Includes CD. The third incarnation of the legendary krautrock project Kluster/Cluster expands its audience with the contemplative, mature, and intelligent electronic music of Echtzeit. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Onnen Bock, and Armin Metz are Qluster, founded under the name of Kluster in 1969 by Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Conrad Schnitzler. Kluster were responsible for two milestones of electronic music. Schnitzler quit the band two years later, leaving Roedelius and Moebius to c…

5th in a series of releases beween Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and electronic artist Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), "Summvs" presents passionate minimal electronics, and includes a Cluster/Eno cover.  The new album will host its world premiere on may 12th, 2011 at the roundhouse in london and will be followed by a european tour called s in may/june 2011 with stations in rome, padua, graz, copenhagen, brussels, eindhoven, paris, frankfurt, bonn, berlin, leipzig and barcelona. The name o…

Detached from all objects" is almost completely spared from today's hysteria and is more foreboding and distorted as their first album "teslas aquarium". They operate with great pleasure in dissecting the vast possibilities of the song formats without losing any of the clarity. "eEure qual ist unser quell" exemplifies the keyboard virtuoso kubin truly is. He works as always with historical analog maschines, organ instruments and with sessile affections to the 60's electronic scene, "geniale dill…

This 7 inch contains extracts of the radio play territerrortorium commissioned by the austrian and german broadcasting stations orf and deutschlandradio berlin. On side a two famous battles are re-animated: in 1410 the order of teutonic knights suffered defeat at grunwald, outfoxed by an united army of polish and lithuanians. 500 years later, the german army conquered the highly superior russian army at a nearby location called tannenberg. this political cocktail comes with a decent flavour of i…

This latest from German weirdos Datashock must be what it feels like to double drop the blue pill. From the first couple of notes of ‘Intro/Lasagne Phalanx’ it’s pretty clear that the extended collective of prog folkies are vying to drag our unconsciousness through the rabbit hole before exacting all manner of mental tortures. It’s probably worth it though; with the gritty, bass heavy backdrop of classic Amon Duul II (I’m talking Yeti here, none of those later-period bootlegs) and the rag…

If you’ve heard of Felix Kubin before, you’ll likely think you have some idea of how ‘Echohaus’ is going to sound. Well forget what you know, you’re wrong – Kubin’s well-worn Sci-Fi pop stylings are entirely erased on ‘Echohaus’ as he rebuilds people’s preconceptions from the ground up. He may have just scored a long-deserved Wire cover, but Kubin is not content to simply rest on his laurels, and although ‘Echohaus’, a collaboration with contemporary chamber group Ensemble Integrales, migh…

"m=minmal continues the collaboration with electronic music legend Conrad Schnitzler.We are happy, after 30 years, to re-release one of the key works from Conrads large adventurous  backcatalog.Ballet Statique is not only a musical milestone but also a highlight of music production. It was recorded in 1978 at the legendary Paragon Studio / Berlin by Peter Baumann – Tangerine Dream in the same period when other masterworks like Cluster – „Großes Wasser“ and solo recordin…

"Actually the first release ever on the revolutionary and innovative Ohr label, Fliesbandbabys Beat Show saw Floh De Cologne's delivering a hard slap on the face on Western Germany's capitalist society. Well-known for their humorous and satirical approach (which gained them comparisons with other freak troupes like The Fugs or The Mothers Of Invention), they deliver a freaky concoction of agit-prop satire and madness with relentless no-barriers free jamming. Political agitation meets free-r…

a new subway tunnel is being built in the harbor area of hamburg's inner city. the tunneling produces waste and the waste needs to be disposed of. in this case sand and shredded rubble are mixed with groundwater in order to be pumped out through steel tubes with a diameter of approximately 80cm. the sounds that are produced in the tubes are object of field recordings that i made at different times and places on site. it was immediately apparent that the continuum of the basic sounds that i used …

"The boundaries in jazz have now become smoother, the horizon is expanding. Dauner, Mariano and Saluzzi anticipated these developments back in the eighties. You can hear it immediately: three world class musicians get together. Wolfgang Dauner is one of the pioneers of German jazz and is one of the first avant-garde players; he also explores classical territory on the piano. Charlie Mariano showed for decades that he had an open ear for world music influences. And the virtuoso on the bandoneon, …

Axolotl Lullabies drifts through the uncanny: Felix Kubin braids nocturnal synth miniatures, tape apparitions, and lullaby forms that refuse to settle. Melodies flicker like phosphorescence, rhythms breathe and retract, and silence becomes a soft voltage. A cradle for insomniacs and dream mechanics alike, it hums at the border where comfort and curiosity blur.

1998 reissue, orginally released in 1984. A combination of spacey electro-pop, dub and dark avant-rock influences, Phantom Band is one of the most authentically weird, essential and yet surprisingly overlooked organisms orbiting the Can universe. This is the third and final album from the project, masterminded by Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, featuring Dominik von Senger (Dunkelziffer, Damo Suzuki Band/Network) on guitar, Helmut Zerlett (e.g. Dunkelziffer, Unknown Cases) on keyboards and Sheldon A…

Magnificent reissue of this tape obscurity from 1980, Cluster's eighth album (the first of three live LPs) originally released on the YHR label (which was curated by Pump's David Elliott), also including archival material never before issued on CD. With so much stuff from this era coming to the surface recently it's sometimes easy to get blasé about it all, but this is one you really ought to give your fullest attention to. As the title says, this was recorded live in Vienna in 1980 at th…

Deeper into... Schnitzler's discography (the missing link, finally !): the unreleased soundtrack to an underground movie made in 1972. classic Schnitzler (rec. same year as the electronic masterpiece Rot) and for sure among the most fascinating music ever received from Con... so long ! ah, and don't worry if you'll have the illusion of being an illusion ,while listening... it's just a Maya