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!
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!
