V/A – Eins und Zwei und Drei und Vier Vol 2: Deutsche Experimentelle Pop-Musik 1978-87

“For their second foray into the fringes of German pop, Bureau B delve deeper than before, raiding cassette culture, 7″ obscurities, and overlooked album cuts to further frame this free-thinking strain of sonic expression. Starting the count from punk’s year zero, this set sees a newly liberated generation get weird and wild with anything they could lay their hands on, delivering demented, detuned and disorienting tracks brimming with DIY spirit. Where their kosmische predecessors preferred immersive, expansive compositions, these artists opted for immediacy, quickly capturing one idea before moving on to the next. Exploiting advances in home recording to say outside of industry confines, these art-school extroverts and commune drop outs often came together in unplanned collaborations and one-off projects, capturing their whole creative lifespan on one side of a C45 . . . The sparse drum machine of ALU’s ‘Aludome’ opens proceedings, laying the foundation for wavy guitar chords and simple melodies on this tender 1980 composition, which only came to light in 2005. From there we sink into the watery electronics, free jazz bass and abstract guitars of Detlef Diederichsen charmingly abrupt ‘Pissnelke 2000’, before Maria Zerfall moves us into the shadows with the dark and punkish dirge ‘Der Mond’, a haunting track with double tracked and distorted spoken vocals. Butzmann/Kapielski’s avant-dance masterpiece ‘Do The VoPo’ diverts us to the dancefloor, where the oddball synth sounds and skewed sampler vox of Rüdiger Lorenz’s ‘Francis & Friends’ traps us in a strange slow motion groove. The tempo raises via E.M.P.’s dubbish sabotage of ’80s smooth jazz, turns inside out on Vono’s charming interlude ‘Der Zauberer’, then finds its feet again via Reichmann’s ’78 composition ‘Wunderbar’ taken from the Sky LP of the same name. This frazzled fusion of cosmic country and Asiatic melody shares a widescreen worldview with Deux Baleines Blanches’ ‘Draht 9’, on which post punk electronics and chiming guitars combine with bittersweet beauty. The time-travelling Rolf Trostel takes us to the midpoint with pulsating chords which predate Basic Channel by a decade, while Phantom Band’s ‘Dream Machine’ stitches together two decades of the psychedelic continuum in a riot of tumbling toms, panning sequences and brain melting waveforms. ‘Glucose’ sees Moebius & Beerbohm unleash their strange music at a delinquent tempo, before Jimmy, Jenny + Jonny offer a second subversion of smooth jazz with their skronking Mediterranean fantasy ‘Salome’. Thomas Dinger’s frosty music box romance ‘Alleewalzer’ and The Wirtschaftswunder’s stomping ska-like ‘Television’ follow in quick succession, leading us into Cluster’s narcotic fairground ‘Oh Odessa’, a queasy assemblage of detuned FM bells and percussive piston bursts. From there, the dubbed-out post punk of Sprung Aus Den Wolken, experimental dance of ‘Notorische Reflexe’ and unhinged disco of Günter Schickert capture different ends of the alternative dancefloor, before the pastoral outsider pop of Lapre’s ‘Septer’ signs off in a swell of yearning melody.” –Patrick Ryder