Music from Germany

Tip! It's hard to imagine how this record -- and it's mate, Outspan No 2 -- managed to remain more or less out of circulation from the CD era onward. Outspan No 1 is nothing less than an ideal distillation of the broad approach to sound creation utilized by the three-ring circus that is Brötzmann, Van Hove, and Bennink, here with the added bonus of Mangelsdorff. Two short numbers, two long, too perfect.

*2023 stock* Before the Munich krautrockers turned more strongly in the direction of world music in the following years, at this gig they once again delivered their mix, moving between funk and jazz, as it defined the mid-70s. Fixed song structures never played a role with Embryo. Apart from the - despite difficult meter - extremely loose-floppy 'Getalongwithasong' (from the 1977 studio album Apo-Calypso), they mainly played new improvisations in Vlotho."

*2023 stock* This album is a bit difficult to pigeonhole, as most of the early Embryo work is. The opening number sounds if anything, like an outtake from Miles Davis' Jack Johnson soundtrack, but with lead guitar sound more prominant. Then, gears are switched, and you are listening to acoustic folk guitar and sitar, which melts into a cool ostenato riff flanging around, that just builds and builds, with countermelody on Violin (or Veena?) and guitar weaving in and out, along with the drum parts…

*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* "Seeing such a political statement on an RLW CD is something I don't recall seeing before. It is about the pandemic and the conspiracy theories that spawned, which I (too) believe is the true disease of our times. "I can read", usually means, "I like to cherry-pick popular notions", and "science is an opinion" is usually said by someone who has no clue as to what science is. Or, as I challenged someone: "How do you prove that all swans are white" to which…

*Limited edition of 500 copies.* In 1972, the left-wing intellectual film critic Uwe Nettelbeck suggested to Anthony Moore that he should write some (relatively speaking) straight songs. He took up the challenge, inviting his old school friend Peter Blegvad over to Hamburg to form the band Slapp Happy. They were joined for a session in Wümme by the young singer Dagmar Krause and Faust as their rhythm section; the recording became the album Sort Of. After getting the band back together for reunio…

*300 copies limited edition* Hematic Sunsets are gone - here come the Statische Musen. A new outlet by Asmus Tietchens for musical endeavors that are more formlular or genre based The four long-form tracks of Diskretion explore "ambient" in the broadest sense of the term. Dense layers, slow dynamic progression, moody atmospheres.   Asmus Tietchens was born in Hamburg in 1947. Since 1975 he has been working as an independent musician; in 1980 he released his first solo record Nachtstücke. After p…

*2023 stock* Views was conceived in January 2003. Recordings were done for track: 1 in January, for track: 2 in February, and for track: 3 and 4 in March 2003. Final Mix: April 2003. All 4 pieces are based on three or four instrumental improvisations by RLW, re-constructed by spontaneous mix afterwards. Track: 1 is recorded with tone-generator (TG 77) using self-programmed sounds. An early version of the sounds had been created for the CD" ACHT (1992). The programs have been designed to be contr…

Alva Noto's award-winning score for the 2022 German documentary film This Stolen Country of Mine directed by German filmmaker Marc Wiese features nineteen compositions to be released on Noton. The documentary film explores the question of a state's sovereignty in the face of foreign powers. The film portrays Ecuadorian resistance fighters and journalists who oppose the sell-off of an extensive part of the country's resources to Chinese investors. Alva Noto's music subtly accompanies the struggle…

"zakè, James Bernard and Markus Guentner build a cascading and overwhelmingly beautiful record that combines the zen of the best ambient/new age music along with the “Big Sky” openness of post-rock bands like Explosions in The Sky and This Will Destroy You. You get songs with chilly names like “Polar Night”, “Seafrost”, and “Arctic Choir” – and there is a sort of vast arctic blue hue to these songs – but it lacks even a hint of desolation. I can imagine listening to something like “Assembly of L…

*150 copies limited edition* With "Onda", Regensburg artist Markus Guentner releases his follow-up to Empire, which appeared on A Strangely Isolated Place in 2021. "Onda" captivates with its orchestral-like progressions, an endlessly interwoven carpet of sound that spreads out over six etudes. As if in slow motion, he scans through the individual sound particles, works out details, lets dust fall from the source material, cores, connects and in the end lets everything flow...

Harald Grosskopf is best known as drummer in the band Ashra and for Klaus Schulze ("Moondawn") and as an electronic musician. Following "Synthesist" (1980, see below), "Oceanheart" was his second solo album. It may sound like a child of the 1980s, but in a compositional sense it is related to the Berliner Schule / Berlin School of the 70's. The reissue comes with a new artwork and was mastered from the original tapes.

Gegenwelt (Parallel World) is the second LP by CEL, a duo Kubin and Zemler formed. More melodically-evolved than their eponymous 2020 debut, it is an even more explicit example of the syncretic impulse that impelled these guys to form the band. Their basic notion was to explore the juncture between two streams of German underground sounds -- the Motorik 4/4 rhythms first posited by Can's Jaki Liebezeit and Kraftwerk's Klaus Dinger, and the sequencer-driven brain loops of early, experimental pion…

LP version. 180 gram vinyl, gatefold sleeve.  The debut album from the original Amon Düül commune collective, released in 1969, stands as one of the most radical and uncompromising documents of the entire German underground scene. This is not Amon Düül II - this is the larger, more chaotic collective that spawned the more structured offshoot, and Psychedelic Underground captures their approach in all its raw, untamed glory. Recorded in a single marathon session, the album is less about tradition…

As part of our series "Experimental Electronic Underground GDR", we are very pleased to be able to make a very special recording available again. On the evening of 3.9.1986, the privately announced and illegal concert took place in the Erlöserkirche in East Berlin/GDR. Montgomery mixed Schnitzler's music live from the tapes. Jörg Thomasius recorded the performance and released the recording in 1987 on his own underground cassette label Krötenkassetten. The elaborately restored original recording…

*2LP version. Limited to 500 copies* For eight years now, songwriter and producer Sebastian Lee Philipp has been steering his project Die Wilde Jagd through the field of tension between contemporary electronic music and avant-pop. Between 2015 and 2020, three studio albums were produced as documents of Philipp's rigorous musical creativity. Most recently, «Atem», a composition for Roadburn Festival, was released in 2022, documenting yet another, more experimental side of the project. On the new,…

The German pioneer of electronic music Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011) amassed a vast archive of sounds for use in combination with each other in live performances. In 2011 the idea came up of con-structing new compositions, not remixes, from this material. The Con-Struct series was born. This release features con-structions by Baal & Mortimer who writes about it in the linernotes: It was exciting to break open existing material, peeling something out of the past and thus transgressing it and open…

She is beautiful. And in a world where so much can easily be possessed on a whim or for a promise, she is not comparable. She has a clear, pure ring, a trueness, like an arrow that has hit an inner mark and can’t be wedged loose. Her voice and her manner, that stretch farther into the past than perhaps she realizes, may set the new style: an existential pop style that is as earthy as Mary Travers (Peter, Paul & Mary) yet more elegant, more isolated. Her name is Nico. I don’t know where she was b…

Unquestionably one of the most exciting books to emerge this year - filled with revelation, insight and surprise, finally offering Conrad Schnitzler the attention and recognition he’s always deserved. An unparalleled survey of his work in music, sculpture, video, performance and installation.

*300 copies limited edition* After 10 years in the making 2021 saw the screen premiere of Kärma Burg's feature-film documentary "Die Experimente des Naum Kotik" (The Experiments of Naum Kotik), delving into the experiments in psycho-physical energy by Russian neurologist Naum Kotik (1876-1920) in the early 20th century. These were adop ted by his grandson Naum Kotik Jr. using his grand father's fundamental research to expand, not to say to revolutionize the possibilities of film making. Kärma Bu…

The cover of Joachim Spieth’s latest album, Reshape, depicts a stony landscape against a moody sky at dusk, silver clouds backlit with soft orange light. His 2021 album Ousia featured a similar sun, only foregrounded by waves. It’s as if some lost, drowned continent rose from the murky depths, dotted with strange fossils and petroglyphs. That contrast is an apt analogy for Reshape — an album of remixes and reworkings from some of the biggest names in ambient, techno and drone in honor of the Aff…