Ingrid Caven

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+

Not krautrock by any measure, but unmistakably from the German underground's other wing. Ingrid Caven was a Fassbinder actress and his briefly-married muse who turned, in the late 1970s, to the cabaret stage and became a Paris sensation billed as the child of Brecht and Dietrich. Der Abendstern, recorded in Munich in 1979, is her second album: music by Peer Raben, Fassbinder's house composer, and lyrics by none other than Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the country's foremost living poet.

The result is art-chanson of a high order, theatrical and literate, sung in Caven's smoky register. Years later the Hamburg band Tocotronic took to closing their concerts with one of its songs. Yves Saint Laurent dressed her, Enzensberger wrote her words; the company she kept is the whole story.