Roedelius

CD version. The Diary Of The Unforgotten is a collection of recordings from the years 1972 to 1978 and was first released in 1990 (with different artwork). Between the years of 1972 and 1978, Hans-Joachium Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, later joined by Michael Rother, lived out on a country estate in the idyllic, diminutive settlement of Forst in the Weser Uplands. It was here that the Harmonia albums, legendary recordings with Brian Eno and various splendid Cluster albums were created. Both the house itself and the surrounding landscape held a magical fascination for Roedelius. The time he spent here was intense in every sense of the word. He translated his feelings and impressions into music, giving rise to the "self-portrait" series. His sixth self-portrait bears the title The Diary Of The Unforgotten and offers a compelling aural record of the Roedelius psyche of the period. For Roedelius, Selbstportrait VI, in particular the 24 minutes of the "Hommage À Forst" centerpiece, were like messages in a bottle, cast into the water in 1990 and now ready to be discovered on the different shores of 2010. Every track on the album is a distant echo from the Forst era. "Even today," Roedelius writes in the original liner notes (1990), "these pieces retain the spirit and atmosphere of those days in Forst, where I learned so much about life." The windswept character of Selbstportrait VI is underlined by the sporadically lo-fi quality of the recordings: Roedelius just let the tape machine run, without overdubs. In the booklet, Roedelius casts his mind back again to the detailed creation of the tracks and their relevance to his later works: "At the end of the day's sessions, I would sit in our small, makeshift ground floor studio almost every night. With the window open in summer, I could hear the ducks quacking on the river, the horses snorting and the cows mooing on the meadows across the water, the wind rustling through the leaves of old elm and oak trees on the riverbank behind the house. This set the scene for my first self-portraits, as well as providing the basis for subsequent studio productions, and other compositions which, in a way, could also be seen as self-portraits." Printed inner sleeve with an appraisal by Asmus Tietchens.