★Bureau B

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.

s of their "Liederbuch" tour, which took the Welttraumforscher from Milano to London or Vienna during the last two years, they developed completely new versions of songs such as "Der Traum der Welt", "This Could Be The Greatest Love in Town" or "Alpha Beta Centauri" in the summer of 2023. These special tracks as well as two unreleased songs can be found on their new cassette, which with the title "1981" refers to the founding year of the Welttraumforscher. After 19 years (2004 saw the release of…

A summit of German sonic royalty: producer Conny Plank, Guru Guru drummer Mani Neumeier and Cluster's Moebius. 'Zero Set' is muscular, percussive electronic funk, dubwise, propulsive and years ahead. A krautrock supergroup in the studio.

Red Vinyl, edition of 500. The archetypal Martin Rev sound – a perennial influence on generations of musicians – is most prominently in evidence in the works of Suicide, the duo he played in across the decades with with Alan Vega. However, the radical and distinctive nature of his music can be traced further back in time, originating in the base energy of rock’n’roll which the teenage Rev experienced as the ubiquitous soundtrack to his home city of New York.

LP version. 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-shrugg…

Ex-Birth Control synthesist Zeus B. Held goes solo and electronic. 'Attack Time' pulses with early-'80s synth-pop drive and studio sheen: melodic, propulsive and slyly futuristic. A producer's-ear gem from the German new wave.

Acid, but tender. Tin Man coaxes emotion from the 303, letting soft-focus melody and deep, humming pulse blur techno and ambience. 'Arles' is warm, hypnotic and unmistakably his: melancholy dancefloor minimalism.

A map of the new German cosmic underground. 'Echo Neuklang' gathers neo-kraut, kosmische and motorik sounds across four decades: a generation carrying the Cluster and Neu! lineage forward, sequencers humming into the present.

Snapshots from the Faust vaults, unheard studio moments from krautrock's most anarchic band. Tape collage, motorik grooves and pure sonic sabotage sit side by side, a document of the collective's fearless early-'70s experimentation.

Momentaufnahme II extends Faust’s recent excavation of their 1971–1974 archive, presenting a second volume of unheard and under‑heard material from the Wümme years. Compiled from recordings that didn’t make it onto the mammoth 1971–1974 (50 Years of Faust) eight‑LP box, this collection functions not as an outtakes bin but as a parallel narrative: how Faust sounded when the tape kept rolling between “official” takes, and how their anarchic, avant‑rock mission permeated even the most fragmentary e…

Release the Beast marks CV Vision’s sixth studio album and his most gleefully hybrid statement to date, a follow‑up to Im Tal der Stutzer that turns genre fusion into its main organising principle. Rooted in an adventurous krautrock spirit, Berlin‑based Denis Schulze (CV Vision) treats psych rock, Detroit techno, distorted synthesizers, black metal and library music not as separate territories but as colours on the same palette. The record unfolds as a wild, cross‑style trip where meandering gui…

You might've caught CV Vision in Berlin, either on stage or behind the mixer at some of his favourite clubs like Arkaoda, Heiners or O Tannenbaum. He could be accompanied by synths, or drum kit, or even full band – channelling his love of Bo Hansson and Claude Larson, or Soft Machine and Picchio dal Pozzo. Always heavy on the backbeat, the songs awash with heady synths and expansive psych inversions. Taking inspiration from deep in the mediaeval mists of times long past, CV Vision comes riding o…

As part of our series "Experimental Electronic Underground GDR", we are very pleased to be able to make a very special recording available again. On the evening of 3.9.1986, the privately announced and illegal concert took place in the Erlöserkirche in East Berlin/GDR. Montgomery mixed Schnitzler's music live from the tapes. Jörg Thomasius recorded the performance and released the recording in 1987 on his own underground cassette label Krötenkassetten. The elaborately restored original recording…

Gegenwelt (Parallel World) is the second LP by CEL, a duo Kubin and Zemler formed. More melodically-evolved than their eponymous 2020 debut, it is an even more explicit example of the syncretic impulse that impelled these guys to form the band. Their basic notion was to explore the juncture between two streams of German underground sounds -- the Motorik 4/4 rhythms first posited by Can's Jaki Liebezeit and Kraftwerk's Klaus Dinger, and the sequencer-driven brain loops of early, experimental pion…

'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.

Limited Anniversary Edition: 180g vinyl, hand numbered, 1000 copies.  In 1974, Cluster entered the sugar era. This doesn't mean that they had finally arrived in their promised land, but they had simply moved from Berlin to the country, to a small place called Forst on the river Weser. Many a thing had changed for band members Moebius and Roedelius since Cluster II: They had moved from boisterous Berlin to this calm rural village, they had founded the band Harmonia, had set up their own studio an…

On their last trip to Silberland, hurtled along the chrome highways and glass skyways of the kosmische landscape, powered ever onwards in perpetual motorik motion. This time, however, the Hamburg imprint opt for an unhurried itinerary, coasting far beyond the familiar rhythmic terrain to immerse listeners in the ambient side of this alternative Allemagne. Building on the tape loops, tone poems, and minimalist compositions of the '60s avant-garde, these musicians utilized the sweeping scope of th…

This is the first solo album by Dieter Moebius, recorded at Conny Plank's studio and originally released in 1983 on Sky Records. By 1969 at the latest, Dieter Moebius was synonymous with the avant-garde electronic music scene in Germany. He and Hans-Joachim Roedelius formed Cluster, a seminal electronic/ambient duo, while Moebius was also a member of the so-called Krautrock supergroup Harmonia (with Michael Rother and Roedelius), as well as collaborating on various other projects with the likes …

Welcome to Silberland – where the streets are paved with strobes. Home to neon lights, straight lines and open roads, this futurist fantasy was first founded in the mid-seventies, when Germany's creative class chose musical therapy in order to indulge their shared hallucination of a new Europe. Fuelled by the catalytic fusion of globalisation and new technology, the world was turning ever faster and the kosmische generation were ready to keep the pace. With synthesisers, rhythm computers and hu…

Martin Rev turns to reverie. 'Les Nymphes' drifts through delicate, looping electronic tone-poems: melodic, meditative and unadorned. The Suicide co-founder in intimate, luminous solo flight.

American indie label File 13 Records released what was already Martin Rev's sixth solo album in the autumn of 2003. The previous year, Rev and his musical partner Alan Vega had struck out in a new direction on their "American Supreme" album and Rev's solo works continued in a similar vein. If "Strangeworld" from the year 2000 actually felt more like a timeless abstract of Martin Rev's entire spectrum of musical influences, "To Live", three years later, introduces more contemporary elements, incl…

*300 copies limited edition* 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 Re…

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.

The German pioneer of electronic music Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011) amassed a vast archive of sounds for use in combination with each other in live performances. In 2011 the idea came up of con-structing new compositions, not remixes, from this material. The Con-Struct series was born. This release features con-structions by Baal & Mortimer who writes about it in the linernotes: It was exciting to break open existing material, peeling something out of the past and thus transgressing it and open…

*2023 stock* 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 a…

From the Liaisons Dangereuses nucleus: Krishna Goineau's sleek, sensual electronic body-pop. Taut sequencer grooves and cool vocals blur EBM, synth-pop and dancefloor tension. Düsseldorf's underground at its most seductive.

There’s something perversely fabulous about the thought of this warped masterwork wandering into 60,000 unsuspecting British homes in 1973. Faust’s second-and-a-half album hit the shops to celebrate their signing to the nascent Virgin Records, who were looking to take advantage of the zeitgeist for German music at that time. Undeterred by the fact the band’s unwillingness to engage with the commercial landscape had seen them dropped from Polydor, Branson and co cooked up a suitably spectacular m…

LP version. 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 insigh…

Dieter Moebius is one of the most important protagonists of avant-garde electronic music in Germany. Alongside his bands Kluster/Cluster and Harmonia, he participated in numerous collaborations (with the likes of Brian Eno and Mani Neumeier/Guru Guru). Seven years after Moebius passed away in July 2015, Asmus Tietchens, one of his musical companions, compiled this collection for Bureau B – he concentrated on his solo works "as they offer the clearest insight into his personality and inventive po…

The lost album. Recorded in 1974 and shelved for decades, 'Punkt' captures Faust between anarchy and melody: brooding, expansive and strange. A missing chapter of krautrock history, finally heard.

*In process of stocking* Dieter Zobel aka Didier Leboz: serial tinkler, inventor, freestyle freak Tension. Performance. Resistance - our Zonic Spezial documenting underground cassette culture in the latter years of the GDR caused quite a stir when it first appeared in 2006. A collaborative effort with the legendary ZickZack label and Verbrecher publishing house, “Spannung. Leistung. Widerstand. Magnetbanduntergrund DDR 1979-1990” (to give the work its full title) caused many listeners, especiall…

When in 2006 our Zonic Spezial "Voltage. Power. Resistance. Magnetic Tape Underground GDR 1979-1990" was published in cooperation with Verbrecher Verlag and the legendary label ZickZack, there was some amazement. Especially when the enclosed CDs were listened to from a Western perspective. Part of this weird Kassettentäter-Ost potpourri of swirling post-punk variety, which Bert Papenfuß, Bo Kondren, Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok compiled with well-founded interpretive authority, was also a pie…

LP version. Composer and conceptual artist Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011) was one of the most influential figures of the electronic avant-garde in Germany. In 1967/68, the Joseph Beuys student founded the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, which became a playground for Berlin subculture. In addition to many other musical stations, bustling Schnitzler was a member of the kraut-electronic formations Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Numerous solo releases complete his extensive oeuvre. One of them is Con 84, probabl…

Fellow humans, Bureau B invite you on an expedition to Silberland, a singular span of spacetime created by Germany’s sonic futurists of the seventies and eighties. Embracing the early electronics and tape experiments of the sixties’ avant-garde, these artists aimed to boldly go, eschewing small steps for giant leaps into a nebulous and novel sound. 1. Die Partei – Strahlsund2. Rolf Trostel – Two Faces (bureau b edit)3. Michael Bundt – Full Steam Ahead (bureau b edit)4. Moebius – Etwas (bureau b …

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.

* Few copies back in stock. US Import * This box is the first virtually complete collection of Faust official studio releases from the years 1971-1974. In addition to the debut album, it includes the 1972 album So Far, the legendary 1973 Virgin UK release The Faust Tapes ("Some chose to play frisbee with the LP, others said it changed their lives" as Jean-Hervé Peron noted), Faust IV and, for the first time ever, the mythical, so-called "Munich album" Punkt, which Faust recorded at Giorgio Morod…

CD version. Bureau B present a very special release: Kiosque Of Arrows 2 is Detlef Weinrich's (aka Tolouse Low Trax) first compilation for Bureau B. Echoing the spirit of the legendary samplers found on Les Disques Du Crépuscule or Made To Measure, this hybrid journal not only collates unusual pieces of music -- rare and undiscovered pearls from the experimental underground of the early 1980s through to contemporary unreleased recordings -- it also represents a reflective collage of cut-ups, obs…

Spunky wave kraut from early ‘80s Germany, portraying the sound of the country’s first proper youth movement, with Conrad Schnitzler, Der Plan, Palais Schaumburg, Asmus Tietchens, Holger Hiller, Populäre Mechanik and many more

'Wide country': Roedelius and Alexander Czjzek paint expansive, cinematic soundscapes. Synth, piano and open space combine in music of pastoral grandeur, meditative, melodic and gently widescreen.

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.