It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play. Miles Davis At the age of 32, Mark Hollis had achieved commercial success with his band Talk Talk’s first three albums, which combined the new wave synthpop of the 1980s with subtle art rock arrangements. This was not the style of music that …
After flirtations with the plastic soul-funk of a surprising Young Americans (1975) and a phenomenal Station To Station (1976), David Bowie decided to move from Los Angeles to Europe. He finally settled down in West Berlin, sharing an apartment with his friend Iggy Pop. Both thought that the German city would be a good place …
It was on Canadian radio where I heard songs from Low for the very first time, that was in 1977. The older brother of a friend owned a copy of the record, it had just been released. I remember how especially the instrumental tracks struck me. They felt almost plastic, like a landscape that as …
I have always rejected the general notion that music was merely a listening experience or throwaway entertainment. Even at its most superficial, music feeds the intellect and the soul, for the better or worse. It informs us of the world we live in, and makes us part of the community we mentally and physically inhabit. …
I have bought Devo’s debut in 1979 after the track “Mongoloid” somehow made it into the Friday-Top-Ten of the wicked local Disco “Kaisersaal”, which was called ‘Ballhaus Vaterland’ (“Fatherland Ballroom”) before. I had wrongly perceived the album as punk- like everything that was gloriously going on one’s nerves. The subversion that emanated from the album …
All music or art just wasn’t created for everyone to understand or share equally. That may sound harsh in our altruistic age. Nevertheless, pretending that art doesn’t exclude strikes me as rather ridiculous and frankly a lie. Some music, like other activities, requires certain surrender. A need for self-submission before the greater discovery. Those blissful …
‘Lodger’ is the final album in the Bowie/Eno trilogy of Berlin albums starting with Low (1977) and Heroes (1977). Each of them heavily is influenced by the zeitgeist of (West-) Berlin, whereas title and cover of Lodger are a direct reference to Roman Polanski’s movie ‘The Tenant’ from 1976. West Berlin’s underground scene was burgeoning with …
‘Krautrock’ is now the common nomenclature for German avant-garde of the 70s, although that was not always the case- the term was originally used to mock and dismiss the experimental music bursting out of Germany at the time. The German innovators of Kraftwerk, Can, Faust and Neu! were artists who sought a conscious break from …
