1-A Düsseldorf - Konigreich Bilk (1999)

Only a few months after Fettleber, 1-A Düsseldorf's second album appeared.  Named in tribute to a district of Düsseldorf, Konigreich Bilk saw Thomas Dinger and Nils Kristiansen expand to a trio, with Steffen Domnisch now credited for synth & vocals.  As noted before, 1-A Düsseldorf had been on the go for over a decade before these CDs started to emerge from Captain Trip, and it's not clear when the material was actually recorded.  The presence here of a soundscape piece titled Bagdad 91 might suggest tracks being recorded over a longer period before release - or they could've just been commemorating the Gulf War a few years after the fact.  Who knows.  Anyway, to the music on Konigreich Bilk.

As with Fettleber, the overriding focus is very much 'unfocused', and this album starts on an even weirder note than anything on the debut, with an old-timey (and uncredited) record of Home On The Range being paired with some metallic clanging.  After that, the more typical sounds of heavily flanged guitar and an odd rhythm track make up Unschlitt, with more melodic keyboards being introduced in Im Märzen Der Bauer.

There's a bit more variety in the sound here compared to Fettleber: The title track sounds like an attempt at mid-tempo heavy rock with vocal samples, and Music Is Love Is Music with its more eerie vocal sound brought to mind Jaki Liebezeit/Phantom Band's Nowhere for me.  The almost Indian-sounding influence of Schlaf Mein Engel is another cleaner, more accessible track, and the album ends with a fifteen-minute slow, dreamlike crawl through wandering guitars and slurred vocals.  There would be another two 1-A Düsseldorf releases in Thomas Dinger's lifetime, that I'll definitely get hold of at some point - especially the Live album, as it features la! NEU?'s Viktoria Wehrmeister on vocals.

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1-A Düsseldorf - Fettleber (1999)

A few years after parting ways with his brother Klaus in 1983, Thomas Dinger started an experimental duo with visual artist Nils Kristiansen, however their first album wouldn't emerge until 1999.  Presumably, like Klaus, Thomas couldn't find a label in Germany to release his music, until Dinger-superfan Ken Matsutani and his Captain Trip Records stepped into the breach.  The band name that Thomas and Nils were using was in fact the original choice for La Düsseldorf: 1A Düsseldorf was intended, in 1975, to mean "the best Düsseldorf", until it was written down as "1a", and noting the resemblance to "la", they hit on a more appropriate name, and the rest was history for the brothers' main band.

By the 90s, Klaus was playing with la! NEU?, who were creating lengthy, freestyle jams using keyboards and guitars, but still frequently retaining recognisable song-forms.  There were no such concessions to structure on Fettleber: hazy, rattling flanged guitars, weirdo electronics and rhythms, samples and tape manipulation were 1-A Düsseldorf's MO.  Nils Kristiansen's vocals, first heard on second track Olala, are equally free-form, dreamlike mumbles, only occasionally making any sense.  The longest track, Rock, consists of rock only in the spoken instances of the title, and otherwise just lets a Kraftwerk/Tangerine Dream-like synth sequence run on.

The next pair of tracks are as strange as the album gets.  Gibsen features more free-form synths and sequences, a repeated spoken sample and other noises, and Gevogeltes adds various avian noises into the impenetrable, varispeed mix.  Fettleber does settle down at the end though, pointing to a slightly more accessible way forward in subsequent albums (with further members contributing).  The title track is based on a simple melodic guitar part, and the closing Kostprobe 3 sounds like a digital update of Kraftwerk's Tanzmusik.  All in all, an absolutely fascinating and criminally underrated part of the Dinger family album.

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