One Track or Album per Week, Number 2: Klaus Schulze, Mirage.

One Track or Album per Week, Number 2: Klaus Schulze, Mirage.

In the 30 Days Challenge I introduced one of my favorite albums pretty much at the beginning: Klaus Schulze, Timewind. But there are two more LPs of the artist in my record collection: Body Love and Blackdance.

In the last weeks I thought over and over again whether I should buy one of the two as a download or as a CD again. After a long time of thinking, however, I came to the conclusion that the latter is too similar to Timewind and that there is only one real electronic firecracker on the first LP.

Instead, during my search I stumbled upon another album by the artist, which I fell in love with almost at first sight: Mirage.

On this album you can find everything that makes Klaus Schulze: sound carpets, synthesizer – chirping, now and then a few percussions. Quiet, meditative music. To relax and switch off. In addition, the tracks are extremely long; summa summarum: does not fit at all in this time, in which everything must go faster and faster and songs in Spotify are listened to only a few seconds. On the other hand, give it a try.

Here are a few tracks:

Crystal Lake: https://youtu.be/BA7WnfnzWzg
Velvet Voyage: https://youtu.be/6Y2UudZIc-4

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 23: Gang of 4, Hard.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Gang of 4, Hard

30 records in 30 days goes into the 23rd round: A piece of your heart can be found in every good car.

Today we will close my musical new wave era with one of the best albums from my whole collection, Hard by Gang of 4. As always, I took a quick look at Wikipedia to get an assessment of the music genre. It was quite surprising what I found about Gang of 4:

“The band played a stripped-down mix of punk rock, funk and dub, with a lyrical emphasis on the social and political ills of society. Gang of Four are widely considered one of the leading bands of the late 1970s/early 1980s post-punk movement. […] Their early 80s albums (Songs of the Free and Hard) found them softening some of their more jarring qualities, and drifting towards dance-punk and disco.”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four_(band) )

As audacious as it sounds, it’s a very good description of the sound of this LP. Have fun listening to it.

Man with a good car: https://youtu.be/XvNmQGol9FM
Woman town: https://youtu.be/bR-y-I9qTUk
Is it love: https://youtu.be/xQOJ6Va03B0

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 22: Joy Division, Substance 1977-1980.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Joy Division, Substance

30 records in 30 days goes into the 22nd round: love will tear us apart, and then we travel to Warshaw.

After talking about the commercialization of punk yesterday, today we’re going to take a step back. Joy Division is for me – similar to Alien Sex Fiend – a missing link between the synthesizer-heavy new wave music and the punk of the seventies. This album is really good, but the group lacks the anarchistic sound and synth experiments of Adrian Sex Fiend.

Don’t misunderstand, this in no way devalues the group’s sound, they are just different. Joy Division are so unexcitingly punk-oriented to me that this album is simply a joy to listen to. Quite typical for me: “Leaders of man” and “Warshaw”. It is also not aggressive (nice sample “Love will tear us apart”), like some other punk records, where you would like to tear down the neighbor’s house after two times listening.

Love will tear us apart: https://youtu.be/zuuObGsB0No
Leaders of man: https://youtu.be/s4prQ11orEM
Warshaw: https://youtu.be/gtSFtvXgeRk

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 21: PIL, This is not a Love Song.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days PIL, This is not a love song

30 records in 30 days goes into the 21st round: no more love songs….

This song is a very nice example of what can happen when you get pulled onto the commercial side of the force. Or in other words: what happens when the hard core punks start making money.The Sex Pistols singer Jonny Lydon founded PIL (Public Image Limited), his personal successor band to the Sex Pistols. The pure punks will have despised him for it, I celebrated him. And by the way: this is not a white sheet of paper, this is the original record cover.

This is not a love song: https://youtu.be/Az_GCJnXAI0

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 20: Sisters Of Mercy, Walk Away.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Sisters of Mercy, Walk away

30 records in 30 days goes into its twentieth round: I’m gone for a while.

Now we come to one of the groups I celebrated not only during my student days, but right up to here and now. The Sisters of Mercy. And for once, there’s a story to go with them. I will never forget the one and only Sisters concert I went to with a friend. I’ve forgotten the location, because of course I didn’t keep the ticket.

The atmosphere was fascinating. The singer Andrew Eldritch in a black coat, the rest of the band members in black clothes on stage. In the middle of a dry ice fog. Indirectly lit from the back of the stage. That’s how I remember the whole stage set-up. Ingenious.

The fact that you could only see the four of them dimly created a very strange, unreal atmosphere. As if there were no people on stage, but ghosts or aliens. Brilliantly done. Something like that should be realised in a club.

Here are the two most popular tracks from the maxi-single:

Walk Away: https://youtu.be/dxucr5TSxDg
Poison Door: https://youtu.be/zsccNOHMVro

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 19: Fad Gadget, Gag.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Fad Gadget, Gag

30 records in 30 days goes into its nineteenth round. Collapses in an ideal world.

Since we’ve been in the middle of my New Wave phase since yesterday, here’s another one of my favourites. It’s funny, there were fewer stories connected with music during my studies. Probably because I had more money in the studio and therefore bought more records. As a substitute for a story, however, there is a remix of perhaps the best-known song from this LP, “Collapsing New People”. It was produced by veteran-DJ Wesbam in 2003.

Here are a few samples:
Collapsing New People https://youtu.be/tLb9IvqxdH8
One Man‘s Meat https://youtu.be/ky5QeomSluU
Collapsing New People (Collapsing WestBam Remix – Extended): https://youtu.be/-JVj0RaMJYI

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 18: Pink Military, Do Animals Believe In God?

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Pink Military, Do Animals Believe In God?

30 records in 30 days goes into its eighteenth round. degenerated man from the wild wild west….

Now we’re in the middle of my New Wave phase. As hard as I think, there is no story coming with this record. So very briefly, it’s simply good. Have a nice weekend.

Here are 4 samples:

Degenerated Man: https://youtu.be/ct2zJAoPqBE
Did you see her https://youtu.be/ymEcFiuiJU0
Wild West https://youtu.be/vGo3WQSkX9o
I Cry https://youtu.be/d1jHWtqURoI

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 17: Kissing the Pink, Naked.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days - Kissing the Pink, Naked

30 records in 30 days goes into its seventeenth round. Let’s take a look at the last film with some big men…

Along with the end of my time in the Bundeswehr (hurray!) and the beginning of my studies (hurray, hurray! The era of boredom and stupidity came to an end, finally I could use my brain again) I started a new musical chapter: New Wave in all possible varieties. Sometimes with a lot of synthesizer, sometimes with guitars, sometimes a mix of both. One of my favourites was this album.

Here are two samples:
Big Man Restless: https://youtu.be/aBqV8k6OevQ
Last Film: https://youtu.be/O0KXVgeGZCc

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 16: Human League, Reproduction.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Human League Reproduction

30 records in 30 days enters its sixteenth round. Listen to the voice of buddha…

Yessss. That’s it. With this record I was finally drawn to the danceable side of electronic music. How many times I listened to it, I don’t know. Quite often, anyway. I was thinking for a long time about picking up the band’s second long-playing record (Travelogue). But no, if we’re already on debut albums, then we’ll stick to that. Just as Klaus Schulze was the spark that ignited synthesiser music, Human League was the spark that ignited danceable electronic music.

Stay tuned

30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 4: 4 by Foreigner

30 Tage, 30 Platten / 30 days, 30 vinyls, Tag 4: Foreigner 4

30 records in 30 days enters its fourth round, with heroes who urgently want to meet a woman in black.

Here comes my musical coming out, part 1. Yes, I have heard something like that once and I connect quite an exciting story with this LP. There are 2 real firecrackers on it (Juke Box Hero, Urgent), which I have heard together with my best friend at that time up and down. By chance we got shortly after it’s release into conversation with 2 classmates and to our surprise they were also Foreigner fans and loved these two tracks very much. A few hours later we had the idea to go to Munich together to see the group live. To our surprise we got tickets and on top of that a place to stay with acquaintances.

The concert was a great success and we partied long into the night. Therefore next day we were not at our best. But after one of us reminded the rest that we will write an art-exam in the late afternoon, the tiredness was blown away. We studied on the way back from Munich to the Allgäu, and we arrived in Füssen 10 minutes before class started, a bit stressed. I’ll never forget the moments when we threw the characteristics of different architectural styles at each other and the panic gradually increased during the drive home.

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