Conrad & Sohn
Thus far the creel pones have all been academically-inclined in some way. by contrast, here’s a repro of a very bizarre one-off private-press lp “released” in 1981 by one-time tangerine dream / Kluster associate Conrad Schnitzler and given only to friends and family ...The b-side is pretty odd, even for schnitzler, with its pitched up vocals & arbitrary lo-fi synth drippings ; but the real prize is the a-side featuring his teenage son gregor on electric bass and completely fried vocals (in en…
Embrace
Nice ambient/minimal reissue from the good folks at the Italian label Orbeatize. The duo of Martin Kornberger and Volker Kuhn put out two lone cassette tapes back in the 80s that all but vanished from the public eye bar a few hardcore collectors of the era. The music sits somewhere between post-kraut German synth and the electronic fourth world excursions of Per Tjernberg. Drifting piano and basic drum machine patterns also recall the work of Paki & Visnadi, the new age stylings of Paulin…
Southland
Chemist by day, synth explorer by night. Rüdiger Lorenz's 'Southland' glides on sunlit sequencer patterns and melodic warmth, homemade Berlin-school music of great charm, a cult private-press favourite reborn.
The Awakening Dream
A Dutch composer's private synthesizer odyssey, 1977. Andriessen conjures a 'trance symphony' on Minimoog and Rhodes: luminous, minimal and quietly euphoric, drawing on Berlin and Düsseldorf electronics rather than the concert hall.
Trans Harmonic Nights
Baumann's brightest solo record. 'Trans Harmonic Nights' sets crisp sequencer motifs against warm melody: the Berlin-school grammar sharpened into concise, luminous electronic pop. Tangerine Dream's pop instinct, distilled.
Atmosphere
Vast, weightless synthesizer vistas from the German cosmic underground. Von Deyen layers Moog and Mellotron into slow-drifting cloudscapes, poised between Berlin-school sequencing and pure ambience. A private-press reverie, on CD for the first time.
Memorymetropolis
Walter Bachauer has been an active part of Berlin's but all in all Germany's electronic and progressive music scene as long as he lived with his greatest achievements being the Meta Music festivals in Berlin in 1974, 1976 and 1978 while he worked as a line producer at RiasBerlin, the city's biggest radio station. In the early to mid 80s he got back to compose and play music under the pseudonym Clara Mondshine and this is his second out of three albums from 1983 “Memorymetropolis”. So let me take…
Con 3
This album saw Conrad Schnitzler head further in the direction of pop music. Like Consequenz, Con 3 (1981) is a collaborative effort with Wolfgang Seidel, alias Sequenza. Con 3 is a really odd mixture of numerous ingredients which Schnitzler was capable of combining with dexterity and taste. His musical handwriting is immediately apparent in the foreground. Effervescent electronic sequences can be heard on all nine pieces, coming from somewhere and appearing to go wherever -- this is Schnit…
Consequenz
Commercial Schnitzler? How quickly, how prematurely are opinions and judgements bandied about when an artist suddenly changes the form of his work. Conrad Schnitzler fell under such a cloud when, after 1978, his songs, for a time at least, did not exceed the catchy compactness of pop songs, while their harmonies and rhythms seemed to be drifting towards pop. Produced by Peter Baumann (Tangerine Dream) the Con (1978) album and the Auf dem schwarzen Kanal 12" EP (1980) ushered in this phase, …