Kosmischer Läufer ‎– "The Secret Cosmic Music Of The East German Olympic Program 1972-83 - Volume Four" (Unknown Capability Recordings ‎– UCKL004V) 2018

While working as a sound editor for DEFA in the 1970’s and 80's Martin Zeichnete led a secret, parallel life writing music to train and inspire East Germany’s athletic elite. This fourth compilation of Zeichnete’s work will take us on a cosmic voyage of both the body and the mind...
Side 1 of this collection contains a running program at 150 bpm taken from various years of the project. After the warm-up fanfare of ‘Zeit zum Laufen 150’ (1977) we launch into the sleek, motorik engine of ‘Goldene Tage’(1982). The second running piece ‘Lichtgeschwindigkeit’ (1983) comes from one of the final Kosmischer Läufer sessions where Zeichnete used a drummer and bass player in the studio. The haunting waltz ‘Der Leuchtturm am Ende der Zeit’(1976) provides a calming warm-down.

Side 2 give us a first listen to a different aspect of Zeichnete’s work.1978’s ‘Der Weg’ (The Path), was the culmination of his experiments to bring focus to athletes’ minds using music and images.

As Zeichnete recalls:

‘As early as 1974 we were looking to provide a mental stimulus for the athletes as well as physical. We began with alpha wave projection and used dream-machine-like devices with an instructor reading inspirational messages. These early attempts appeared to have no real value to the athletes so I progressed to making a film with a suitable soundtrack.
To view ‘Der Weg’ the subject would be comfortably seated in a darkened room wearing headphones. The film would be projected large-scale onto a concave wall filling their field of vision’.

The film began with a voice-over while a light pulsing gently at 10hz appeared on the screen. Once the subject was attuned to their surroundings the film then progressed as follows:

Phase I – Forst - As the music begins we see scenes of the universe, of life on earth and nature. We end up in a beautiful forest with sunlight playing through the leaves. This section evoked a sense of calm.

Phase II – Das Meer - The deepest part of the meditation. We are flying across the ocean as the sun is rising. Then we are under the sea. All is tranquil as we move among the shoals of fish.

Phase III – Heimat - We are now in modern East Germany. We see the country we love. We see the faces of the people we as athletes will represent. Positive messages appear on the screen.

Phase IV – Morgen - We see our fellow athletes training and winning great victories for our country. Captions on the screen tell us that this is our future!

Sadly, the film has been lost to time but it lives on in Zeichnete’s vibrant soundtrack.

Zeit zum Laufen!"

Tracklist:

A1 Zeit Zum Laufen 150
A2 Goldene Tage
A3 Lichtgeschwindigkeit
A4 Der Leuchtturm Am Ende Der Zeit
B1 Der Weg (Introduction)
B2 Phase I - Forst
B3 Phase II - Das Meer
B4 Phase III - Heimat
B5 Phase IV - Morgen

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Kosmischer Läufer ‎– "The Secret Cosmic Music Of The East German Olympic Program 1972-83 - Volume Three" (Unknown Capability Records ‎– UCKL003V) 2015

I suspect that most of the DDR womens athletic team trod that fine line between being a male while still retaining enough of the female to be considered a woman.
Andreas Krieger,was once known as Heidi Krieger,and competed as a woman for the DDR, winning the gold medal for shot put in the 1986 European Athletic Championships.Trouble was that Krieger was dosed up with so much anabolic androgenic steroids that she changed sex.
At the trial of the leader of the East German sports program and East Germany's Olympic committee, Krieger testified that the drugs he had been given had contributed to his trans-sexuality;the doping deprived him of the right to "find out for myself which sex I wanted to be."

Maybe it was a combination of this training music and the drugs that tipped Heidi into manhood? So be attentive, do not listen to this gorgeous Kosmiche musik at the same time as downing a few doses of anabolic steroids,or you may just change gender type.

As it says in the liner notes:

This third collection of Martin Zeichnete's secret work for the DDR's athletic elite comes in two parts. First, a running program (Tracks 1-3) at 164BPM finds Zeichnete at his most hypnotic, particularly on the motorik, rolling 'Jenseits Des Horizonts'. This set ends with the elegiac 'Für Seelenbinder', a song dedicated to Olympic wrestler and communist hero Werner Seelenbinder.
Particularly exciting is the second part (Tracks 4-10), a soundtrack to a lost animated film UCR obtained only a few months ago.
In the spring of 1976 Zeichnete learnt that the NOK der DDR hoped to launch a bid to bring the 1984 Summer Games to East Berlin. Excited, he returned to DEFA in Dresden where he and an animator colleague conceived ‘Traum Von Der Goldenen Zukunft’ (Dream Of The Golden Future), a 20-minute cartoon they hoped could be used to promote the bid. An inspired Zeichnete composed the music in a week. The bid and thus the film were abandoned and the music was cast aside where it lay hidden and forgotten. Until now.

Tracklist:

A1 Zeit Zum Laufen 164 2:54
A2 Jenseits Des Horizonts 10:13
A3 Für Seelenbinder 4:14
B1 Traum Von Der Goldenen Zukunft (Theme) 1:32
B2 In Der Stadt Und Auf Dem Land 2:16
B3 Der Traum Des Mädchens 3:29
B4 Der Traum Des Jungen 3:42
B5 Unterwasser 1:11
B6 Ankunft Im Stadion / Das Rennen 2:31
B7 Die Turnerin 1:36
B8 Siegerehrung / Abschied Von Der Zukunft 5:32

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Kosmischer Läufer ‎– "The Secret Cosmic Music Of The East German Olympic Program 1972-83" - Volume Two (Unknown Capability Recordings ‎– UCKL002V) 2014

Todays drugged up East German athlete in the spotlight, is the one and only Marlies Göhr.That sprinter with the strange short staccato stride style,hairy armpits,and terrible hair-do's, that dominated womens sprinting in the 80's.Incredibly she was the only East German athelete to have tested positive for drugs,androgenic steroids, in 1975 as a 17-year-old.Yes, Androgenic drugs can have an effect on one's gender,so I suspect Marlies may have had to shave....her face...not her furry armpits.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Stasi (secret police) files suggested widespread official doping under the East German regime...surprise surprise.
However, I would prefer to believe that it was this training music that inspired our fav drug cheats to achieve dominance over the west rather than performance enhancing chemicals.
Volume Two is even better than volume 1,mixing up a bit of Kosmiche with a bit of Motorik,like a groovier Tangerine Dream.
All done without performance enhancing drugs......Shame on you Marlies Göhr, but you and your team mates brightened up those dour olympics in Moscow,and we missed your delightful villany during the tit-for-tat boycott in Los Angeles.Apparently she now shaves those armpits.....what a shame?.....as in that other kind of shame, rather than the hang your head in shame variety.

Liner Notes:

Tracks A1 - B1 from a running programme at 172 BPM with warmup and warmdown pieces.
Tracks B2 - B6 were written to acompany the gymnastic floor excercise and finally tracks B7 - B8 take us onto the ice with two pieces written for the figure skating long program for Katarina Witt.

(More liner notes as a PDF HERE!

Tracklist:

A1 Zeit Zum Laufen 172 3:13
A2 Morgenröte 9:51
A3 Flucht Aus Dem Tal Der Ahnungslosen 10:13
B1 Die Kapsel 3:22
B2 Die Libellen 1:29
B3 Mausi Mausi 1:30
B4 Walzer Der Roten Katze 1:34
B5 Chronik 1:39
B6 Der Hörraum 1:32
B7 Für Kati 3:53
B8 Weltraumspaziergang 4:13

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Kosmischer Läufer ‎– "The Secret Cosmic Music Of The East German Olympic Program 1972-83 - Volume One" (Unknown Capability Recordings ‎– UCKL001) 2013

The myth spoiling music Stasi have suggested that this is an elaborate hoax.The same bastards who unveiled the identity of the Residents, and that Captain Beefheart made nearly everything up.
This should be ignored, and I truly believe that this music was comissioned by the DDR government,and those drug fuelled monsters in the DDR olympic squad used this to train to.
As Hoaxes go, this one is impressivly watertight,which is reason enough to put that aside and enjoy the georgeous analogue beauty of the Kosmiche Musick trapped in these grooves, and imagine Heike Drechler downing gallons of performance enhancing substances to those classic warm synth sounds.
Here's an amusing interview with the, alleged, composer of these pieces, Martin Zeichnette:

An Interview with Martin Zeichnete. Berlin. February 2013:
Q: Hello Martin, we'll start at the beginning I suppose. Where did you grow up?
I was born in Pesterwitz, which is near Dresden, in 1951. Before the war my parents had been teachers. Afterwards my father worked for the FDGB and my mother sometimes gave music lessons.
Q: Where did you begin your music career?
My first job was as an apprentice sound editor for DEFA, (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), in the Trickfilme (Animation) department in Dresden. I learned techniques in tape editing and 'special effects' which I would put to good use later on in my 'invisible' career. Perhaps because we provided music for animated film we managed to sneak in some avant garde ideas that would not be tolerated elsewhere. Some of us saw it as a game. Between us and the state censors.
Q: Tell me about the music that inspired Kosmischer Läufer?
Although we were of course aware of popular Western music at the time, very little was available to us. Our primary source came from radio stations broadcasting from the West. Due to the geography of the area this proved difficult in Dresden! There was a station I could get from Düsseldorf that played Kosmische Musik , you know, Kraftwerk and Cluster and Neu! and so on. To me, sitting in the attic tuning the radio dial, searching for anything, hearing these beautiful new electronic sounds, it did seem like music from the cosmos. I would record it and pass tapes on to my friends. We did have people in the East doing electronic music, such as Paul-Heinz Dittrich, but I found their version of it all too studious. The music from the West was fun. It had energy.
Q: How did the idea come about?
I was a keen amateur runner and when out I would play these motorik, repetitive songs in my head. I thought somehow it could be used as a training aid for athletes. The electric pulse sort of thing. I thought it could benefit the athletes mind as well as body, the music would be hypnotic, it would bring focus. Then at work I was shown a prototype design of Andreas Pavel's 'Stereobelt' and I knew this could be possible.
Q: So how does it go from an idea to a reality?
It was not in a good way! I shared my ideas with colleagues at work but as was often the case in those times I perhaps spoke in front of the wrong person. One day at the studio two SED members arrived and took me away in an official car.
Q: What did you think was happening?
Well. I didn't know, you think of everything you have said, everyone you have said it to, but I think I knew it would be about the music. I feared I would lose my job, at the very least. It would be very bad for someone who worked on party films to be seen to be influenced by the enemy, you know, Western culture.
Q:Where were you taken?
We drove in silence to the outskirts of Berlin to what I later found out was an athletics camp. They knew all about me and my idea. They questioned me about the concept for hours then left me alone in the room. Later an official from the Nationales Olympisches Komitee came in and told me I would begin to work on the project immediately.
Q: Just like that! It seems very matter of fact?
Yes, I was stunned, but sometimes that is how things happened then. We know now that the athletic directors were trying anything to gain an advantage in those times. At least my idea did not harm the athletes. I was in a studio in Berlin the next day.
Q: Did you work alone or with other musicians?
To begin with it was just myself, the engineer and always a state official who would sit in the corner observing. The first things I tried were basically electronic metronomes at various paces with very little melody. These were tested but the athletes didn't respond very well so I began writing more 'musical' pieces. Sometimes I would be joined by a drummer and a guitarist. It was incredible, when I would explain to the musicians what we were going to do, you could tell immediately the ones who 'got' what the music was. We would be in the live room doing 20 minute space rock pieces while a government official sat bored on the other side of the glass. It was surreal.
Q: What equipment did you have access to?
It varied. We had some Western technology in effect units and such but the synthesizers were mostly Soviet in origin and could be very temperamental. The studio in Dresden had a Subharchord which I had used before on animation soundtracks, it was a great machine. I filled in many claim forms for equipment. Sometimes it came, sometimes it didn't. The Moog didn't. I do know that the athletes in the program were probably the first people in the East to have Walkmen as I saw the order for 300 units.
Q: Did you ever meet the athletes?
Not really at the time, always there was a minder there when I met with them and the coaches to discuss what they needed. It was a shame, they were my only audience. Years later, after reunification, one former Olympian I met confessed to me that he would try and swap the training cassettes supplied to him for Western music at international meets.
Q: How long did the project continue?
I would be summoned to Berlin generally in the winter to produce tracks for the upcoming athletics season. The last work I did was in 1983 doing pieces for the gymnastic team's floor performances. The project stopped as suddenly as it had started. I was given no explanation. I think it may have been due to the boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics.
Q: How did you retain the music?
Well, I was not supposed to take the music from the studio as it was state property but I did manage to sneak a lot out. I thought the master tapes had been destroyed or lost in the chaos after the wall came down but one of the engineers, who 'got' it, had rescued a lot of them. We transferred them to digital in the early 90s.
Q: Why release this now?
I made this music for people to train to. Because of the time and place I did it only a select few got to use it. I would like for more people to finally use and enjoy it. It is as simple as that."

Liner Notes:
This program should allow the average runner to complete a 5 kilometre run at a reasonable pace. Included are 3 minute warmup and warm down pieces.
This program was used by the East German Olympians in the 1970s.
Tracklist:

1 Zeit Zum Laufen 156 2:56
2 Sandtrommel 6:26
3 Die Lange Gerade 13:07
4 Tonband Laufspur 6:32
5 Ein Merkwürdiger Anschlag 2:49

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