2025 stock German conceptualist Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg—alias the polymath Uli Rehberg—returns with "Der Kleine Fritz In Klopstockland," a release as enigmatic as its creator and as cryptic as the label that hosts it, the fabled Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien. As with much of Rehberg’s output, the boundaries between sound art, musique concrète, and dadaist narrative dissolve into a singularly strange proto-surrealist zone.
"Der Kleine Fritz In Klopstockland" oscillates between spoken word vignettes—delivered in von Euler-Donnersperg’s unmistakable Teutonic baritone—and warped, lo-fi tape manipulations that feel as if they’ve been exhumed from some forgotten East German archive. Field recordings, distorted electronics, and fragments of classical motifs drift in and out like ghosts, alluding to the album’s titular Klopstockland: a mythic place both satirical and somber, invoking Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Romantic poetics refracted through post-industrial malaise.
This release is a meditation on memory, cultural trauma, and the absurd. It is also mordantly funny in places, full of oblique references and sonic non sequiturs that reward the attentive ear. True to the Walter Ulbricht ethos, these are sounds designed to confound and provoke, resisting easy consumption. "Der Kleine Fritz In Klopstockland" is a phantasmagoric assemblage—part radiophonic drama, part sonic collage—evoking lost times and alternate futures, all filtered through von Euler-Donnersperg’s singularly eccentric sensibility. File under: avant-garde, spoken word, hauntological oddity.
