Brian Eno - Before And After Science (1977)

For his last in a run of art-rock-based albums in the 1970s, Eno assembled the cream of the musicians he'd worked with thus far (including members of Roxy Music, Brand X and Cluster - I ran out of space in the tags to list every name), and recorded over a hundred possible tracks over two years.  This was whittled down to ten that were a summation of the quirky avant-pop/rock sound he'd established, and also looked forward to his increasingly ambient interests.

Overlapping in part with the time Eno spent with Bowie in Berlin, Before And After Science plays well against Low & Heroes, not least on King's Lead Hat (also anagrammatic of future collaborators), and has several krautrock touch points too.  The lyrics on opener No One Receiving look forwards to The Belldog on After The Heat, and Moebius & Roedelius themselves appear on By This River, giving definitive Cluster & Eno overlap.  Another krautrock guest appearance comes in the form of Jaki Liebezeit's drumming on Backwater.

Energy Fools The Magician aside, the original LP's two sides divide neatly into an uptempo, jagged art-rock side and a sublime pastoral side.  As good as the former is, the latter takes the crown for me in Eno's 70s output: the lovely Here He Comes; the bucolic-melancholic Julie With; the aforementioned Cluster co-write; an ambient instrumental aptly dedicated to Harold Budd, and the gorgeous closer Spider & I (thought by some to be about Bowie).  Outside of his purely ambient work, Eno really doesn't get better than this.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Another Green World
Cluster & Eno 

After The Heat
Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (with Harold Budd)

Ambient 4: On Land
Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks (with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno)
The Pearl (with Harold Budd & Daniel Lanois)

Michael Rother - Katzenmusik (1979)

Third album by NEU!/Harmonia guitarist, and a further refinement of the melodic, cyclic music he'd established on his first two solo efforts, also collaborations with Jaki Liebezeit and Conny Plank.  Rother's increasingly clean-toned guitars (his formative influence of Hank Marvin really shining through) burn these simple, indelible melodies into your brain from the first listen, and make Katzenmusik a joy to return to over and over.

As well as the literal meaning of "music for cats", the album's title is also a German idiom for a "musical racket" - clearly an ironic choice on Rother's part for such sunny, joyous and ordered music.  Melodic material from earlier sections leads to variations in later ones, with the sparkling production adding to the constant gentle evolution as well as throwing the occasional curveball (the "everything reversed except the drums" wash of part 8 is one highlight of many).  This gorgeous record is probably the high point of Rother's post-Harmonia music, at least for me.  Anyone heard the new ambient album he put out last year?  Worth picking up?

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pw: sgtg

Klaus Dinger + Rheinita Bella Düsseldorf ‎- Néondian (1985)

Happy New Year everyone!  Since I seem to have established a tradition of starting the year (and marking the anniversary of this blog) with a Klaus Dinger album, let's keep that going.  Néondian, which was intended as the fourth La Düsseldorf album, saw Dinger up against the adversities of falling out with his brother Thomas and La D. third member Hans Lampe - creatively, contractually and personally - to the point where he was blocked from using the band name.

The solution was 'Klaus Dinger + Rheinita Bella Düsseldorf ' - cheekily keeping the band name tucked away alongside the name of their biggest hit to help with public recognition, and a new set of musicians accompanying Dinger on the most electronic, and most polemical (at least until first album La! NEU?), music of his career.

Néondian first came my way via the 1995 Captain Trip reissue, onto which Dinger had daubed further ownership of the album on to its cover in his inimitable style of the time.  Mon Amour - which would've been the title track had the original concept worked out as planned - was one of those opening tracks I kept on repeat for months on end.  Jaki Liebezeit guests on drums, as Dinger unfolds one of his most majestic instrumental tracks.

As mentioned above, this album saw Dinger at his most acerbic and politicised, taking shots at German society and his contemporaries (Pipi AA) and at US foreign policy (America).  Your mileage may vary as to whether setting diatribes like these (and an update of Cha Cha 2000) to bouncy synthpop was the best idea - I still feel that the other tracks, either instrumental or mostly-instrumental, work much better.  The best thing about America might be the guest slide guitar from Bodo Staiger, who had briefly been a member of  70s Dinger protégés Lilac Angels - more from him later this week.

For a fuller review of Néondian, see this one that I wrote for Julian Cope's Head Heritage about 14 years ago.  It makes me cringe a bit now - the general tone of reviews on that site (not least Cope's) was infectious on me in a way that now feels like pretense, and it's waaay long (FFS, do some Uni work, stop sitting in the library writing album reviews!), but hey ho.  The urls I mention are unfortunately dead.

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In 2006, Warner Germany rounded off a much-needed reissue programme of the first three La Düsseldorf albums with this - a re-arranged version of Néondian finally given its original 'Mon Amour' title.  Still legally prevented by Lampe from using the band name (the contentiousness of this whole reissue in fact saw it deleted within a year, although an LP pressing did appear very recently), Dinger's workaround this time was to officially credit the album to 'la-duesseldorf.de'.  The remastering may be a slight improvement on the Captain Trip CD, according to taste.

The 're-arranged' running order saw America and Pipi AA trading places, Jag Älskar Dig promoted to the first half of the album, and the addition of three bonus tracks.  Two of these are from the last proper La Düsseldorf release, a 12" that appeared in 1983 - I say 'proper', they're not even band tracks - Ich Liebe Dich was a solo track by Klaus that became Jag Älskar Dig on Néondian with minimal tweaking (if any), and the dark and quirky Koksknödel was a solo track by Thomas Dinger - more from him next week.

Lastly, Geld 2006 (Internet Warm-Up Version) was a trailer for the release of 'Viva 2010', a reworking of La Düsseldorf's second album, with the Japanese-German musicians with whom Dinger spent his final years.  I can remember Dinger's old website first claiming that 'Viva 2000' was imminent for release, then it was to be 'Viva 2004' - it didn't appear in 2010 either, likely due to Dinger's recent death.  His heiress Miki Yui, responsible for the two Japandorf releases, is apparently still planning to release the 2000s Viva at some point.  Hopefully the finished Geld was a step up from the demo here, in which they (with guest Herbert Grönemeyer) largely seem to be singing over the original 1978 track with the addition of some Japandorf-era guitar.  Who knows when we'll find out.

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Can - Monster Movie (1969)

R.I.P. Jaki Liebezeit, 26 May 1938 – 22 January 2017

Just like last year, all the great legends continue to leave us... I suppose 78 is a good age to get to; even so, this is a sad day for losing one of the greatest drummers of all time, who by all accounts was still active and even planning to work with Malcolm Mooney and Holger Czukay again, I read today.  Both of them first appeared on record with Liebezeit on this groundbreaking record.  

I was  16/17, and had been listening to The Velvet Underground, starting to get into Kraftwerk, Faust and Can... but the opening minutes of this album were like the Velvets upside down and inside out, and sounded like nothing else on earth.  And then there was the first side-long Can epic hypnotic ritual - if you haven't heard Yoo Doo Right, you're in for something special. Download now!


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Previously posted at SGTG: Nowhere

Phantom Band - Nowhere (1984)

In the late 90s, this little promo compilation used to come free with some Can CDs - I'm sure I had three copies at one point.  As well as being a decent Can overview, the disc closed with one track from each of the four core members' 80s work, and one in particular really made me sit up and listen, and buy this album shortly afterwards.  That track, a stew of clicking percussion, ominous electronics and mournful spoken vocals, was Weird Love.

Jaki Liebezeit's Phantom Band released three albums between 1980 and 1984, of which Nowhere was the third, and was reissued by Can's Spoon records in 1997.  The others, which I don't have yet, are now available as Bureau B remasters - must get Freedom Of Speech soon, as apparently it's in a very similar vein to this one.

Nowhere, then, (or Now Here according to Liebezeit), is a fantastically odd glimpse into what a stripped-down, updated Can might've sounded like in '84.  Thirteen short-ish tracks of murky, echo-laden dub krautrock based around post-NDW guitars and synths, with an distinctive, off-kilter vocalist.  In this case, stepping up to the mic was Sheldon Ancel, a former US Armed Forces Network announcer.  After an intial groove into outer space, Ancel brings the album's themes sharply down to earth, with post-industrial workaday drudgery like Planned Obsolescence and Morning Alarm.  On the reggae parody Positive Day we get a pisstake of a self-help guru straight out of the 70s/80s self-realization New Age.  Highly recommended; for my money Nowhere is by far the most fascinating post-Can artifact, Holger Czukay's pioneering body of work notwithstanding.

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