I always thought that 'Vater' was spelt F-a-r-t-e-r,....oh how we laughed,and kept up the fine English tradition of childish purile humour and an almost total ignorance of foreign languages.
Travelling down the autobahn I could often be heard pointing out the Ausfahrt signs at the exit junctions, shouting in a German/English accent not unlike Franz Liebkind from The Producers,"AUSFAHRT VERBOTEN JA!".......ahh come oooonnnnnn,its hilarious,and always will be......unless you're German,when virtually nothing funny is hilarious.
Especially unhilarious was life in soviet puppet state the Deutsche Democratic Republik, when 'Jokes' were especially thin on the ground.What could Communist Comediens possibly find to take the piss out of without blurring equality red lines;although I'm sure Anti-American jokes were allowed for sure and the joke teller in line for another Karl Marx comedy award.
Yeah, I know there'll be plenty of ex-inmates of the DDR ready to tell us what jolly japes they got up to in the Stasi social club raffle before the curfew;...just let me enjoy myself at your expense,i'm well aware that Germans,both east and west, do indeed have a sense of Humour.....its just very,VERY, subtle.
Oh Yeah...the music.
Stein and Brett were the Hall and Oates of Abstract Iron Curtain Electronica.Matthias Stein and Frank Bretschneider(again!)are the exact opposite to Hall and Oates' frankly despicable blue eyed soul,and exist, surely, to rebalance the physics of reality and cancell out the horrors of "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)".
Well mr Hall and Oates, I can't go for you,no can do!
Bretschneider and Stein, yes can do.
DOWNLOAD and smell my farters ausfahrts HERE!
Another project involving KlangFarBe maestro Herr Bretscheider is the minimal abstract electronica of Kriminelle Tanzkapelle.Every track is a dark monotonous symphony of foggy oppression that only living somewhere like Karl-Marx-Stadt in cold war DDR could create. This makes the industrial musings of those in the West sound like the spoilt bleatings of ungrateful brats in comparison.
I notice a mention of the late and beyond great Alan Vega on the insert.This stuff is yet another offpring given birth by Frankie Teardrop....so of course I exempt Suicide from any accusations of being spoilt brats.
I suppose we all live in our own personal East Germanys in our minds...."we're ALL Frankies, we're All burin' in Hell"(A.Vega 1977)
DOWNLOAD the sound of your own personal communist satellite state HERE!
Frank Bretschnieder was the East German equivalent of Alain Neffe,if not in profile, but in the amount of significantly weird and scrambled up musiks that he managed to squeeze onto the medium of ferric-oxide coated tape.
This,for all intents and purposes, was Frank's debut album,on his own frankly(pun intended) superb cassette label 'klangFarBe', from the lovely DDR town of Karl-Marx-Stadt,with its delightful post war Soviet architecture and a horrifying disembodied monument to the great man himself......check this postcard as if taken directly from a line in the Pistols' "Holidays In The Sun" pop hit.
Hmmmm, lovely ain't it?
There are places like that all over Europe,but at least they had the excuse of being bombed to fuck .There are also towns like this in the USA and the only bomb attack they ever had was on 9/11,Anything over 50 years old gets demolished and a post modern brutalist skyscraper gets erected in its place. Hmmmm,sounds like what actually happened to the Twin Towers;demolition then erect an immense human-free edifice in its place. That said, The World Trade Centers were one of thee worst examples of brutalist architecture and deserved a couple of passenger jets crashing into them if you ask me....which you ain't,but I gotta write something irrelevant for the recording I'm writing about or I wouldn't be me would I?
Frank gives us a bunch of what can only be described as 'Experimental Electronica" at its abstract best. Its amazing that Frank was never arrested for making music like this,just like it was amazing that The Eagles were never arrested in the west for their crimes against western culture.Not that Bretschneider was guilty of such heinous crimes as 'Hotel California',but one had to be careful in Democratic Republic not to stray too close to decandence or a bohemion lifestyle,or you may find yourself pencilled in for a re-education program.
DOWNLOAD a postcard from Karl-Marx-Stadt HERE!
Not all the music in the DDR was released on the State labels,but if you wanna to put your own challenging,politically unacceptable work, you had to...yup......Do It Yourself. Behold the liberation of the audio cassette.Even more so than in the west, where the people were oppressed by the need for profit rather than by an ideological totalitarian regime. Thoughts were repressed in this gloomy remanent of the reich,and if you wanted to express them without a lurking Policeman taking notes in the corner,then you had to escape to the west which usually ended up in an east german cemetary.
An easier way to escape this enclave was to smuggle cassettes into the west.This was,somewhat, less risky.
Behold the KlangFarbe label from Karl Marx Stadt,founded by Franck Bretschneider.Of course you can't call anything after Karl Marx anymore,so the town was charmingly renamed Chemnitz after the collapse of the regime.
So here's a taster of the Karl Marx Stadt underground from 1986.This is what the real East Germany sounded like.Gloomy,abstract,miserable and minimal.Not the kind of thing that would have been state approved....no-one was officially 'miserable' in the glorious DDR.
DOWNLOAD your own personal berlin wall HERE!
DDR synthesist,Jürgen Ecke, dared to do what even Paul 'N.N.N.N.N.Nineteen' Hardcastle would never consider with a Fairlight.Almost every horrible eighties production value has been turned up to the max on this East German manual on how NOT to do electronic music.
Like a soundtrack for a bad 80's Madonna Movie, or the music for an endless love-making scene in Miami Vice, the music spews forth hefty Gated Reverb snare sounds,with the despised Fairlight sampler Orchestral Stab.
It smells of the "Well we've bought all of this latest equipment so we might as well use it......a lot" syndrome.....and yes there's a syn-drum in use too.
Its absurd datedness make this album almost avant-garde its unintentional self-parody;but also charming in its quaint cluelessness.When this hit the dancefloor (singular tense is intentional) of downtown East Berlin,the Polit Bureau would have lapped it up as a demonstration of how socialism is more than capable of keeping pace with the west in all technological areas; be it Chemical Weaponry,mass surveillance techniques or Popular Music styles."You Young people WILL be happy,and You will DANCE with your socialist Joy!!"
Tracklist:
A1 HAYH-HAYH 4:11
A2 Auf Der Suche Nach... 5:00
A3 Irritation 2:54
A4 Der Letzte Tag 4:40
A5 Über Allem Ist Ruh' 4:14
B1 Über Dem Nördlichen Wendekreis 4:04
B2 Bolero 3:53
B3 Kulmination 3:02
B4 Der Ewige Traum Des Ikarus 3:59
B5 Illumination 3:55
Liking the artwork again!?.... what's going on there?
A saucy young communist lady relaxing in an art gallery looking at some really shite paintings, then reaching for a photograph of our hero's in Servi slotted into the inside jacket pocket of a....Dummy!? This is the kind of extreme art statement that can bring down walls. Just as David Hasselhof did after his world chamging concert in Berlin in 1989. So combining the 'Hoff' with Servi on their respective sides of the Berlin Wall,was so powerful that the thing had little choice but to crumble before the power of Pop Music.
Naturally, the 'Hoff' has a problem with self-delusion and auto-agrandising Psycopathy,as well as being a shit actor, and musician toboot;but, Servi aren't that bad, in fact they're was is known in the world of understatment as 'Not Bad'.
While the youth of the UK danced the second summer of love away on drugs and elctronic tunes played by forty year old DJ's in a field around the M25.The youth in the German Democratic Republic had to make do with this bunch of television intermission tunes.One can now appreciate them as coming from a place that we could never possibly comprehend having lived our lives in a liberal democracy that prides itself on promoting freedom,even if we are not really free at all. Of course I refer to the 'Prison without walls' concept of control.A slavestate where our feudal lords like to pretend that the slaves are the ones in control,when the fact of the matter is that we control each other;trapped in a capitalist machine embodied as a flaming car racing downhill to the cliff edge with no brakes and no-one at the wheel.Like Dogs, the human race need a leash and a master to bark orders, or the dog will run into the road under an oncoming Bus. Also like Dogs, we, without fail,tend to destroy the things we hold most precious.Our Planet, the natural world, and,the thing we adore most of all,.....ourselves.
A Good,but unintentionally weird album,from a good but unintentionally weird former country.
Tracklist:
A1 Tagtraum 1:58
A2 Entdeckung Von Augen-Blicken 3:09
A3 Sie 0:58
A4 Pas De Deux (Begegnung) 3:02
A5 Menetekel - Zeichen An Der Wand 3:01
A6 Ernüchterung 9:16
B1 Solitude 3:48
B2 Worte Suchen 7:27
B3 Ein Lächeln Auf Deinem Gesicht 2:29
B4 ... Und Nach Dem Satz: Ich Liebe Dich, Ist Die Stille Die Gleiche 7:59
B5 Abendlied 1:53
