★Bureau B
Allez-Teia (Heldon II)
LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Heldon's second album Allez-Teia, originally released on Disjuncta in 1975. Before making his own music in the early '70s, Richard Pinhas was a King Crimson fan. The British group has buzzed in Pinhas's mind for decades, but their greatest impact came early. When he first saw them play, Pinhas was struck by music played during intermission. "When I saw (King Crimson guitarist) Robert Fripp and Brian Eno perform in Paris later, I realized that the intermi…
Traumland
LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Tyndall's second album Traumland, originally released in 1981 on Sky Records. The electronic sonic inventors Tyndall pulled out all the stops for their second album. Armed with an impressive array of analog synthesizers, they unleashed the full force of their experimentalist ambitions, weaving synth pop, repetitive bass patterns, laminar sounds, and carefree melodies into a unique amalgam of the Düsseldorf and Berlin Schools. Traumland was released…
Les Cassettes 1980-1983
LP version. In the early 1980s, the French musical duo Fondation, comprising Ivan Coaquette and Anannka Raghel, released three tapes of fantastic electronic music which owed much to the experimentalism of the seventies. Synthesizer, drum computer, solo guitar. Repetitive, meditative, hypnotic -- between ambient and synth pop. Les Cassettes 1980-1983 presents a selection of their finest pieces from this period. During an extended sojourn in Italy around 1970, the multi-instrumentalist Ivan Coaque…
Live in Vienna 1980
Double-LP version. The first live recording of Cluster (Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius), and their only collaboration with Austrian musician Joshi Farnbauer (drums and percussion), recorded in Vienna in 1980. A sonic throwback to their early years, reissued on CD. Were one to be presented with two separate stacks of Cluster recordings -- one composed of their studio work, the other of live performances -- an innocent listener might conclude they are the efforts of two completely d…
Nordborg
"Electronic musician Adelbert von Deyen’s debut and sophomore album were released just a year apart from each other. “Sternzeit” was followed by “Nordborg”, which featured only one track on each side. Again, von Deyen took his time crafting a meditative maelstrom of ambient sounds. The B-side, “Iceland”, is actually an acoustic interpretation of a snowstorm in Nordborg, Denmark, as remembered by von Deyen.
Von Deyens debut album “Sternzeit” had caused quite a stir in 1978 in his home tow…
Rhizosphere
LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Richard Pinhas's Rhizosphere, originally released in 1977. Richard Pinhas is one of the most important French electronic space rock musicians. Following five albums with his band Heldon, he released his first solo record in 1977. Backed by Heldon's congenial drummer François Auger but no longer bound by the group dynamic, he explores his freshly purchased Moog modular system in search of new sounds. It marked a departure into new realms. "We don't n…
After The Heat
Brian Eno's second album collaboration with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster consists of slow-moving instrumentals full of repeated synthesizer sound patterns and sustained guitar notes. An idyllic spot ofland
Cluster & Eno
The first of two milestones in ambient music recorded by Germany's legendary electronic pioneers Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius together with Britains music eccentric Brian Eno.
Southland
Just when you thought you had heard everything that German electronic music of the 1980s had to offer, up pops an artist who has resolutely stayed off the radar all these years, in spite of having a discography which lists no less than 18 albums. (Hobby) musician Rüdiger Lorenz, a pharmacist by trade, completed an album almost every year beginning in the early 1980s, first as limited runs of two to three hundred on cassette, then switching to vinyl in 1983, and CD in 1990. His last album was rel…
Konzerte 1972/1977
LP version with CD. The two authorized recordings presented on Konzerte 1972/1977 vividly conjure up the atmosphere, perhaps even the magic, of a Cluster performance back in the day. One took place in 1977 during a science fiction festival in Metz (France). The other dates back to an earlier show in Hamburg's Fabrik venue. Cluster played three gigs in the city in 1971/1972, including the one partially included on 1972's Cluster II (LR 335LP). Cluster shows routinely lasted six hours or more, …
The Awakening Dream
LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Jurriaan Andriessen's The Awakening Dream, originally released in 1977. Jurriaan Andriessen (1925-1996) was a Dutch composer. Although he was actually at home in classical music, he recorded three synthesizer albums in the late 1970s, the first of which, The Awakening Dream, is an outstanding excursion into experimental ambient and minimal music. Andriessen himself, 52 years of age at the time, called it a "trance symphony". The music - perhaps su…
Fresh Air
LP version. Orange vinyl version with bonus 7". Includes CD. Faust's new album Fresh Air differs in several respects from its predecessor, Just Us (BB 182CD/LP, 2014). The recordings were made at Jean-Hervé Péron's rehearsal studio in Schiphorst in northern Germany, hypnotic pieces with the kind of noisemaking the band is known for. For the new album, Péron and Werner "Zappi" Diermaier were looking for communication with musician friends and the audience. The tracks were recorded in changin…
Oceanheart
"Sky, the record company, were more than a little disappointed with the performance of Grosskopf's first solo effort "Synthesist", so there was no great sense of urgency as far as its successor was concerned. "they even halved my advance!" Grosskopf recalls. "Oceanheart" was released some six years after "Synthesist". "The album title reflects my love of transcendental meditation, of course it might be taken for watery esoterics." (A similar vibe was evident in the cover art, hence fresh artwork…
Musik Fur Metropolis
LP version. Includes CD. Dieter Moebius (1944-2015) was one of the most important protagonists of avant-garde electronic music in Germany. He was a founding member of Kluster/Cluster (with Conrad Schnitzer and Hans-Joachim Roedelius) and Harmonia (with Michael Rother and Hans-Joachim Roedelius) and worked with several artists such as Brian Eno, Conny Plank, Mayo Thompson, Hellmut Hattler, Asmus Tietchens, Mani Neumeier, Arno Steffen, Jürgen Engler, Jean Hervé Peron, Zappi Diermaier, and Chris Ka…
Filmmusik 2
LP version. Bureau B present part two of their Filmmusik double release. In 1975, Conrad Schnitzler recorded various pieces of music to accompany films which had yet to be made. Fittingly, he labelled this collection of songs Filmmusik. Only one of the tracks - "Gute Fahrt" ("Nice Journey") - would ultimately be paired with a film, now traceable on the internet for all to see. The music is included on Part 1 of Bureau B's Filmmusik double release (BB 244CD/LP, 2016), erroneously entitled "02/198…
Sammlung: Elektronische Kassettenmusik, Dusseldorf 1982-1989
LP version. Post-war apartments dominated the views of Düsseldorf in the early 1980s - cement slabs, the "art bunker" known as the Kunsthalle, and the elevated railway called "The Millipede". Yet reconstruction was in full swing - bank buildings on the "Kö" received postmodern interiors, the old town became stylishly retro-rustic, and advertising agencies displaced industrial companies. Music took all of this on. Punk was finished, but its pathos drifted through pubs and shared flats. At the sam…
Magnetband: Experimenteller Elektronik-Underground DDR 1984-1989
LP version. Inspired by punk and post punk, vibrant scenes dedicated to independent self-actualization by means of self-distributed cassettes - the cheapest and fastest medium - were developing on each side of the Cold War's confrontational line. Albeit, under quite different circumstances. While there was a DIY euphoria in the West, which would also have had ideological motives, subcultures in the East simply had no other means. Even the first act of replication meant moving into illegal territ…
Trans Harmonic Nights
LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Peter Baumann's second solo album Trans Harmonic Nights, originally released in 1979. From 1971 to 1977, Peter Baumann was a member of the legendary Berlin band Tangerine Dream. The group were pioneers of the so called Berliner Schule (Berlin School) which had a profound impact on electronic music. Trans Harmonic Nights sees Baumann continue to break free from the gravitational pull of Tangerine Dream. Hans-Joachim Roedelius was recording the Jardin Au F…
Machines of Desire
LP version. Includes CD. "In October 2014 an idea suddenly came to mind. Although I had spent much of my life performing, recording and producing music, my attention over the immediately preceding years had been focused on the philosophy and psychology of human nature. It was a rewarding exploration, but I missed being more creative -- suddenly I felt the urge to play music again. I built a recording studio in my basement and began writing material for the first time in a long while. In November…
Atmosphere
LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Adelbert Von Deyen's third album Atmosphere, originally released in 1980. Album number three from electronic musician Adelbert Von Deyen marks the end of his ambient phase. Whilst Atmosphere largely swathes listeners in familiarly vast expanses of sound, the driving analog drums of the opening track (Von Deyen's most successful, as it turned out) signal a shift towards electro-kraut terrain. Atmosphere showcases Adelbert Von Deyen at the peak of his powe…