Retro future past explorer. Ultraromance, hazy desire, a whiff of nostalgia. Excitement, confusion, and disenchantment. Internalization leads to alienation. And the cognition that everything can turn into a straight up joke after a while. So »relax and implode«… The second full-length album of Berlin musician and futurologist André Uhl invites the listener to a sonic adventure with high emotional impact. Eleven songs are carefully crafted like sculptures in a swampy landscape. Warm, gritty, and viscid, the unique sound aesthetic leads the path through the dusty twilight, breathing down your neck, providing comfort and disturbance at the same time. The sound material was recorded in a church during André’s two months long artist residency in a monastery in Alsace, France, where a specific set of microphones was used to capture the unique reverb of the nave. Additional material was recorded in Philadelphia, New York and in André’s Berlin studio. Field recordings play a central role in the album, defining the mood and building the rhythmic foundation for all the compositions. Other elements were produced with a wide range of different analog and digital instruments. A powerful lead of a Roland Jupiter 6, the warm organ of a Moog Opus 3, the quirkiness of a circuit-bent Casio PT10 – or the clicking of an electricity meter in an apartment. » More

On »Tekkno Polo«, which was originally released on cassette and as a download by Oficyna Biedota in 2013, Jemek Jemowit addresses his Po-lish roots unsing the means of disco polo power. Disco polo is the Polish version of Italo Disco. It completely ignores everything that made Italo Disco great. It is known for its slightly bad arrange-ments, 3-tone melodies and forced rhyming, using pre-set sounds from the 1990s. On the EP Jemowit deals with total anti-patriotism (»An-typatriota«), grotesque hyper-patriotism (»Bigos») and Americanized over-patriotism (»Born in the PRL«). The EP ends with an anti-love-song (»O milosci«), using lyrics from Polish crooner Marek Grechutas’s »Bedziesz moja pania« from 1970. The EP has been remas-tered by Jeans Team’s Franz Schütte in 2020 to stunning effect. More

he record will be released in a limited edition of 500 numbered copies. For each 100 copies the silk-screen printed cover will change its colour.
F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) is an art school band from Munich that formed in 1980 in the editorial office of the underground magazine Mode & Verzweiflung and issued disturbing slogans of a new dissidence like: Wir sagen Ja zur modernen Welt (we say yes to the modern world) and Heute Disco, morgen Umsturz, u¨bermorgen Landpartie (disco today, coup tomorrow, a country outing the day after). The Italian Futurists’ idea to flood Venice was joyfully appealing to them so they made the serious demand to convert theaters into parking garages (Theater zu Parkha¨usern). The futuristic development of so- called noisemakers (a productive modification of the sounds of industrialized cities as well as the completely new war machines of World War I) carried a key moment of deviant pop music into its emerging discourse: clipping, distortion, Bring the Noise. The hedonistic partisanship of the band F.S.K. particularly affected its eclectic zigzags (from post punk to rhythm & blues, country & western to techno soul) and morphed into yet another new, postmodern shape in the 1980s in England (where John Peel was a prominent promoter of F.S.K.) and in the 1990s in the US, where their music faced the transatlantic feedback of the songs of American occupying forces. Back in Germany their music took on more abstract forms that were described as Cubist with the last album Akt, eine Treppe hinabsteigend (nude descending a staircase): aesthetic lines that move from Luigi Russolo and Iannis Xenakis, Sun Ra and Larry Heard to the glitches of the latest bass music. In the traditional lineup of a rock and roll band, today F.S.K. musically executes all of these threads. Their piece Ein Haufen Scheiß und ein zertru¨mmertes Klavier (a pile of crap and a shattered piano) developed for Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) explores productive axes between destruction and deconstruction (paying tribute to Luigi Russolo). More

When Martin Hossbach asked Dirk von Lowtzow whether he was interested in covering a song of Hossbach’s favourite English pop group, Pet Shop Boys, he immediately said yes. Von Lowtzow chose »I Want a Dog«, the b-side of »Rent«, also featured in an epic Frankie Knuckles remix on the album »Introspective« (1988) (whose inner sleeve showed Pet Shop Boys holding dogs). »And what about Neil Young?« »Sure, Martin! But you choose!« No sooner said than done, Hossbach decided that it would also have to be a song about animals. He went for »Beautiful Bluebird« from »Chrome Dreams 2« (2007). Both songs were recorded and produced by Moses Schneider. The dog on the cover is drawn by von Lowtzow himself, the artwork is by Will Bankhead, Honest Jon’s graphic designer who also runs the labels The Trilogy Tapes and Hingefinger. The first fifty copies, available only via the label itself, each include a unique pencil drawing of a dog, again made by Dirk who is really good at it – as you can see in the accompanying video which was filmed by the Berlin-based production company Kobalt. More