Kontakta

condition (disc/cover): NM / NM

A Cologne improvisation record from the mid-Nineties, built from live sessions at the Kaspar-Hauser-Studio between March and November 1992 and released in 1994 on the French Odd Size imprint. Kontakta as a group was a loose collective drawn from the then-thriving Cologne experimental music scene: C-Schulz, Frank Dommert (founder of Sonig / A-Musik / Odd Size's distribution partners), Georg Odijk, Inde du Nord, Marcus Schmickler (who would soon become a major figure in the Mouse on Mars / Sonig orbit), and Monika.

The sessions were captured live, with minimal post-production, which gives the record its loose real-time character. The musical method is closer to European free-improvisation practice than to the tape-based concrète work that dominated Cologne's electronic scene a decade earlier; Kontakta belongs to the moment when Cologne began pivoting toward what would soon become the international "click-house" / minimal-techno-adjacent post-rock scene, but the Kontakta CD catches the moment before that pivot, when the Kaspar-Hauser-Studio was still primarily a venue for free-form electroacoustic improvisation.

Issued on Odd Size (the small Parisian imprint run by Jean-Marie Onni, a label more often associated with French and Belgian post-industrial artists), the record places these Cologne improvisers into a pan-European distribution network. One of the small-edition artifacts of the mid-Nineties European experimental scene, and a quiet point of documentation for what C-Schulz, Dommert, and Schmickler were doing before their subsequent higher-profile projects took off.