Konrad Kraft

Pionneering production from the Düsseldorf mid 80s electronic underground world. Transferred for the first ever time from the original cassette to vinyl and CD. Konrad Kraft (Detlef Funder) is one of the still overlooked producers of Düsseldorfs fertile electronic music scene. Arctica was originally released on Cassette on Funder's imprint SDV Tonträger in 1987 in a handmade edition of about 50 copies only. Reduced to its essential musical elements, Arctica certainly contains some of the most uncategorizable and bewildering pieces of mid-eighties electronic music. Set between the areas of post punk and early techno, the album undulates between analogue as well as digital instrumentation. After Konrad Kraft's appearance on the enthusiastically received compilation Sammlung - Elektronische Kassettenmusik, Düsseldorf 1982 - 1989 (compiled by Stefan Schneider for bureau-b in 2017) Tal presents his full-length album for the first ever time.

At the time of the Arcitca sessions, the newly set up SDV studio consisted of a Tascam 38, an eight-track tape recorder, and only a handful of synthesizers such as a Roland JX3P and a Korg Monopoly. The style of Konrad Kraft's productions displayed (ever since and up until today), a strong adherence to an idea of continual self-creation and a quality of wanting to be responsible for one's own identity. Even three decades after its recording, Arctica still evokes images of an expedition into an edgy cold place which has strange wonders, polar lights, structures of ice and innumerable worlds and creatures in store.