*150 copies limited edition* Jabbering people, a dry bassline, nagging punks, the bassline again, a dry cough, the U-1 passes by a guitar starts weeping: welcome to Schickreich, a rare recording of a super group that cut short into a duo. Comprised of bass, hurdy gurdy, Jew’s harp player, DJ, Intermedia-artist Udo Erdenreich, and Berlin’s cosmic kraut legend Günter Schickert. They were bandmates in Ziguri and played since the late 1980s off and on as Schickreich. Marmo now brings to life an album that uncovers two wings of their manifold musical explorations.
The A-Side, “Die Zukunft ist den Kindern und den Narren“, is an epic live recording from Easter Sunday 1988, when Schickreich first performed at Das Arschloch, an open-air pit at Kreuzberg’s Oranienstr. 1 / Manteuffelstrasse 43 at Berlin’s Görlitzer Straße underground station. At that time, the pit was a regular venue for concerts, performances, happenings, and other events of art. Free and outside was the slogan. The duo performed an improvised show alongside the megaphone shouting of Mirko from the Irren-Offensive, a 1980 formed association that served (according to the statutes) "the self-help of current or former psychiatric inmates" and "works toward creating understanding of madness and finding new ways of living with madness." The group's friend Uschi Schröder, at that time cultural manager in Berlin's underground culture, recorded the unique show with her cassette recorder, walking around in the pit, absorbing music, bypassing city noise, and the talk of the audience. After 35 years in deep sleep, the unique cultural document gets published for the first time. It brings all that Angst, that revolutionary Geist, that anarchy, West-Berlin had to offer for a brief period. You hear them shouting for free madness over low hanging bass figures and stretched guitar echoes. The audience is part of the show, children talk while strange drones appear just to disappear again.
The B-Side features a totally different musical universe of Schickreich. A meditative one, recorded 2008 by Günter Schickert while playing live to an audiovisual show about the cultural heritage of Tibet called Tibet Rediscovered. Two eight- to 16-minute-long tunes run by the names “Kang Rinpoche” and “Mapam Yu Tso”, featuring Günter Schickert playing his famous snail horns, while Erdenreich adds gentle bell tones, jaw harp frequencies and percussion on the flight. They are documenting an inner voyage into Schickreichs deep layered telepathic zones, where both artists speak in tones to each other, imagining the mountain regions of Kang Rinpoche and the nearby clear waters of high-altitude lake Mapam Yu Tso as a spiritual musical galaxy of their very own. Gently played, with long meandering tones in the spirit of Pauline Oliveros, unfolding a mystical story ark for friends of trance-portive music. Manufactured with snail horn, guitar, hurdy gurdy, bell, jaw harp, percussion, and two inspired spirits, that trust each other’s visions deeply. Free music for free zones.
Three recordings, two different atmospheric longings, created by two individuals of West-Berlin’s free agitating cultural zone, that followed their very own artistic path, never coping with the current, ever listening to their peculiar heartbeat, that pumps deep down in their psychedelic souls. Günter Schickert, Udo Erdenreich, Schickreich in eternity.
