Edition of 300. Sold out at the label. In the twilight territories where industrial decay meets visionary electronics, certain recordings emerge from the shadows carrying the weight of forgotten futures. Such is the case with Mentocome's self-titled album from 1992, a spectral transmission from Düsseldorf's underground that has remained largely obscured for over three decades until now. This haunting collection of post-industrial chamber works represents one of the most enigmatic and prescient documents from the liminal period between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dawn of the digital age, when artists carved sonic territories with no predetermined audience in mind.
Mentocome were Rainer Rabowski and Axel Grübe, two pivotal figures in West Germany's radical electronic underground who operated at the intersection of avant-garde experimentation and industrial innovation. Rabowski commanded the legendary Klar!80 imprint, a cult platform that channeled the most uncompromising post-industrial sounds across global networks extending from Düsseldorf to Tokyo. Grübe brought invaluable studio expertise gained through his apprenticeship with the legendary Conny Plank, while both artists collaborated in the influential ensemble Roter Stern Belgrade, positioning them at the epicenter of the Neue Deutsche Welle's most adventurous expressions. Recorded in the cultural crucible of early 1990s Düsseldorf, this album emerged from a city where DIY electronic music coexisted with the revolutionary media art of Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Wolf Vostell—visionaries who reimagined the nature of perception itself. This fertile creative environment permeates every moment of Mentocome's sole album, which unfolds as a singular oneiric journey through cracked electronics, dilated time perception, and hypnotic minimalist constructions.
The album's eight movements trace an arc from dankest post-industrial murk through elegiac chorales and into territories of profound ambient suspension. Opening with slurred choral tape loops that seem to emanate from some forgotten cathedral of decay, the compositions gradually reveal layers of gunky bass frequencies and curdled fourth-world gestures that stain consciousness with their sulphuric intensity. The artists reserve complete freedom to traverse whatever sonic territories their hypnagogic logic demands, creating passages of noir-tinged drone vapors, prepared piano meditations, and spectral radio transmissions that feel both ancient and prophetic.
The work's closest spiritual companions might be found in the fractured minimalism of Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba, the meditative expanses of Tolerance's Divin, or the collaborative experiments of Eno, Moebius, and Roedelius, yet Mentocome achieved something uniquely their own—a sound that captures the peculiar melancholy and possibility of the early 1990s, when the future remained genuinely uncertain and electronic music could still surprise even its creators.
The album's temporal manipulations create an effect of perpetual twilight, where familiar elements—industrial percussion, ambient textures, chamber instrumentation—are stretched, compressed, and refracted through what sounds like vintage analog processing pushed to its absolute limits. The result suggests music heard through the walls of adjacent dimensions, familiar yet utterly transformed by its journey through unknown spaces.
This official reissue, expertly remastered by Alex Nagle, reveals previously obscured details within the album's dense tapestries while preserving the essential murk that defines its character. Limited to 300 copies on 180-gram vinyl, this resurrection allows contemporary ears to discover what prescient listeners in 1992 were already hearing—a transmission from a parallel timeline where electronic music followed entirely different evolutionary paths.
For devotees of the period's most uncompromising experiments, from Werkbund's time-dilated constructions to Konrad Becker's Monotonprodukt investigations, Mentocome's album represents essential archaeology. This is music for the deep listeners, those who understand that the most profound electronic music often emerges from the margins, where artists like Holger Czukay and Conny Plank once demonstrated that technology could serve mystical rather than merely commercial ends.
More than three decades after its original appearance, Mentocome's self-titled album reveals itself as both historical document and prophetic vision—a reminder that the most interesting electronic music has always existed in the spaces between categories, where industrial decay and ambient transcendence achieve their most haunting synthesis. This is the sound of forgotten futures finally receiving their due recognition, a precious document from a time when the underground still held genuine secrets.
