RLW, Ralf Wehowsky

Featuring: Der Plan, P.D.

condition (record/cover): NM / NM (in shrink)

Ralf Wehowsky, known since the late Eighties under the abbreviation RLW, is one of the essential German post-industrial musique-concrète composers of his generation. Wehowsky began as a founding member of P16.D4, the Würzburg collective that, beginning with the 1984 LP Kühe In 1/2 Trauer, pushed the Nurse With Wound / Faust / Can lineage of German experimental music toward a drier, more rigorously edited tape-cut aesthetic.

After P16.D4 dissolved in the early Nineties, Wehowsky concentrated on his own RLW solo work, almost all of which has appeared on Selektion, the imprint he ran with Achim Wollscheid out of Frankfurt. Selektion is one of the most conceptually consistent small imprints of the European experimental scene: austere black-and-white design (by Wollscheid), small print runs, long lead times between releases, a near-complete disinterest in the conventional music industry.

The RLW catalogue includes extensive solo work on Selektion as well as collaborations with Kevin Drumm, Andrew Chalk, Jérôme Noetinger, Thomas Lehn, and many others. Wehowsky's working method (minutely-edited tape collage at glacial pace, processed field recordings, archival material cut against itself) has positioned RLW as one of the most sober and uncompromising European concrète practitioners of the past three decades. A genuinely essential figure for any serious post-industrial collection, though consistently difficult to source given Selektion's production scale.