Cranioclast

condition (record/cover): NM / NM (seal is cut)

Folded poster-cover in plastic bag with sealing sticker.

The first release on Cranioclast's own CoC imprint, and the opening statement of one of the more conceptually committed German underground projects of the late Eighties. Cranioclast operated mainly as the duo of Sankt Klario and Soltan Karik (pseudonyms that anagram around the artists' real identities), occasionally expanding with contributors credited as Klara K. Tonsi and Rita N. Koslak.

A Con Cristal is a bunker record. Literally. The two long tracks, "Breakthrough" and "Beachcombers," use World War II coastal bunkers (mostly on European shorelines) as documentary subject matter and partial sound source, treating these concrete carcasses not as military leftovers but as bizarre post-functional sculptures, relics of a culture that has outlived itself. Each original copy of the 12" arrived with a sixteen-page A4 booklet, a standalone "bunker advertising" insert, and one of seventy-six different mounted bunker photographs on the front cover, so no two copies share a cover image.

The musical method is an austere electroacoustic dialect that overlaps with what Nurse With Wound, Organum, and H.N.A.S. were doing contemporaneously in the same corner of Europe, but with a more specifically architectural obsession. Cranioclast's best work belongs on the same shelf as those groups; A Con Cristal is the point at which they first made that case audibly.