(Bureau B)
A compilation of DIY releases smuggled out of 1980s East Berlin on cassette includes glistening minimalism, pulsating grooves and wonky techno
Cassette culture may now seem like some quaint hipster affectation but, for a generation growing up in East Germany in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was the prime medium for underground music. Fans would smuggle in recordings of new music from West Germany on tape, while avant-garde musicians in the eastern bloc’s most repressive country could circumvent state controls over vinyl pressing plants – and avoid the watchful eyes of the Stasi – by copying their own music on to cassettes and distributing them (like samizdat newsletters) to likeminded freaks.
One of these freaks, Jörg Thomasius, ostensibly worked in East Berlin as a boiler mechanic and art gallery technician, but his real vocation was music. He was a member of the Zappa-ish collective Das Freie Orchester, ran a home studio called Tomato and hosted a show on pirate radio, drawing inspiration from experimental krautrock bands on the other side of the iron curtain. In the 1980s, he sneaked out three albums on cassette, and Acht Gesänge der schwarzen Hunde (Eight Songs of the Black Dog) – the latest in Bureau B’s Experimenteller Elektronik-Underground DDR series – compiles 10 tracks from these DIY releases.
Continue reading...by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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