Circles - Same -1983- (LP, Einhorn Music), Germany

So we're some days into the new year and I don't have a clue what to post, I've got so much amazing stuff at the moment, don't have much time and I'm trying to only post two releases every month to give this blog some time to exist into this future. Anyway, here is one of many posts around German cult-group Circles which was donated to me by a friend of the blog (Thank you!). This is something I'd never tought I would hear and happy to share.

Circles were a band from Germany that started out in the early eighties and consisted of the duo of Dierk Leitert and Mike Bohrmann. They created a mixture between old psychedelic krautrock grooves, wave-y guitar textures, electronic kosmische sounds, NDW and rock 'n roll. They are a perfect example of the particular period of Germany's early eighties when the influential Krautrock period started to merge with the fresh Neue Deutsche Welle music. Circles released three albums on their own label Einhorn Music and also had side projects like D.O.C. (Das Organisierte Chaos) which was more electronic oriented.

This first album is quite daring and rough in its approach, just like what you'd expect from a debut record. It's an energetic and dense trip full of electronic sounds, weird vocals, psychedelic guitar stuff and much more. Similar things that come to mind are german bands like 39 Clocks, Harmonia, Teflon Fonfara's album Inge In Venedig and American Milwaukee based band F/i. Actually this type of music is also what influences myself the most I guess, a mixture between the hippie-ish psychedelic krautrock music and eighties synth, noise, ambient, industrial type of stuff.

I have red that allegedly there is a reissue of this record coming out on Ultima Thule Records soon. If this happens I will kindly take this link down and link to the website (I hope so, this stuff is incredible!). More Circles and related projects to follow soon on the blog.

Highly Recommended!

UPDATE! Links removed due to the reissue on Mental Experience, a sub-division of Guerssen records.The first and second album of Circles have been reissued on CD and LP. Get them HERE!

Donated by SonicA

Trumpett's Play & Dance Choir - Somewhere in This Milky Way -1983- (New Year Cassingle EP, Trumpett 0022), Netherlands

Merry Christmas and an Archaic New Year to all friends and followers of the blog!

This special New Year's cassette EP came out in 1983 on the legendary Dutch minimal synth label Trumpett. Trumpett is home to some of the best Dutch synth acts from the early eighties like Freakowitz and Einstein, Ende Shneafliet, Doxa Sinistra, The Actor and many more amazing pseudonym minimal synth acts by people on the label. Personally it's also one of my own favorite record labels. 

Due to the many side-projects featured on the label, Trumpett sometimes published special releases on certain holidays. This cassette came out for Christmas and New Year in 1983 and was published as a  Christmas card. It contains three absolutely amazing minimal synth tracks in a Christmas fashion. The first side contains the Christmas song The New Little Drummer Boy, which talks about a drummer boy who is forgotten on Christmas day. The second side of the tape has an amazing take on Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer called Rudolph the Rednosed Alien with a vocoder(!). The last song Twinklin' Stars under a Bloodred Sky is a great instrumental Christmas-synth (minimal X-mas) gem. This was posted before, but here is the original cassette. This stuff must be the greatest Christmas music ever. Really.

Get it HERE 

Because of this New Year's post I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate the underground music blogosphere that roughly exists for a decade now. The Thing On The Doorstep for example is already here since 2006 (congratulations!). Although most of the great music blogs started out in 2007, a year before people had already been engaged in other platforms and it can be viewed as the starting point for most of the alternative music blogs. Some time ago I wrote an article in Knik (magazine of Amsterdam's best underground venue OCCII) about my blog and other strange music blogs and their importance (I might upload that one day). If you just think about how much music history has been rewritten these last ten years and how much forgotten music has been saved, given its deserved attention and has been rereleased it's pretty impressive. Just take this last year and take a look at some of the reissued artists scattered over labels:

Krozier and The Generator, Second Layer, Bernard Fevre, Max Vincent, Aksak Maboul, Heldon, Älgarnas Trädgård, Thi-Tho, Semool, Egisto Macchi, Eela Craig, Pekka Airaksinen, Moral, Van Kaye & Ignit, Ilitch, Bruce Ditmas, Wapassou, Ton Steine Scherben, Vía Láctea, Muslimgauze, L. Voag, Twilight Ritual, Jean Guérin, Wolfgang Dauner's Group, Syntoma, Sogmusobil, Piero Umiliani, Family Fodder, Franco Leprino, Proyecto A, Alvaro, Nuno Canavarro, Popol Vuh, Haku, Lena Platonos, Intersystems, The Cravats, Milan Knizak, Richard Bone, Mariah, Bourbonese Qualk and many many more (just to name a few). 

That's a serious list of reissues coming out every year. It's getting hard to keep up! Also a great deal of this music used to be completely unknown some years ago. It means that we still have a group of people in these mad times pushing forward all of this innovative and totally ahead of its time music. Everyone involved in this shaping of music history and preserving cultural expression is greatly appreciated. Great work for the artists, new generations, history, anything. Aside from that I want to say that there is a lot of incredible new music as well at the moment!

Thanks to all involved in the music blogosphere for a decade! Happy New Year! And see you at the blog next month. I've got some great posts lined up as well as some unexpected donations!

Bence - AI

 

にんぷたい (I Want Pregnant Women) - Nymph -1987- (Cassingle, Elecuitel Records), Japan

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So usually I don't really post stuff if I don't know what it is that I exactly share, but then again that really happens rarely. This is a Japanese cassingle from 1987 of a band which name would be more suitable for some sort of Japanese harsh-noise project. I translated the Japanese band name and found out it meant I Want Pregnant Women, what to think of such a band name? Anyway, it turned out that this is everything but harsh-noise: the music is strange kawai Japanese new-wave pop or something like that.

The three song-cassette contains the song Nymph in two different versions and a cool weird late eighties electronic track with drumcomputers. The only thing I know is that this was released by the Elecuitel label in Japan, which also published the great Dali-Soli flexi disc (might be the same group) that was presented years ago on Habit of Sex, a blog specialized in Japanese underground music. I recommend you -if you haven't done it yet- to walk through the archives of the Habit of Sex and Stalking Duppi blogs to discover endless great recordings from the Japanese eighties underground.

UPDATE: Thanks to a follower of the blog I now know that the sound engineer was Masaharu Tanigawa who made a strange record in the early eighties and also played on the first Ché-SHIZU album. Also the band consisted of about five people playing different instruments. Check out the comments for more information.

Get it HERE

Qua Dance - Same -198X- (Cassette), Netherlands

Qua Dance was a new wave band from the Dutch city of Groningen. They existed from 1981 to 1984 and consisted of Huib Westerbaan (bass), Roel Steenbeek (drums), Kees Douma (guitar) and Marieke Smit (vocals). They released one single in 1982 on the Frisian Top Hole Records which was posted a long time ago here and to be heard here. Also someone wrote a small article on Qua Dance over here.

This cassette might be from 1981, because bands tend to self release their material before they get picked up by any record label. It's a cassette-only EP release that contains five different tracks. As for the music: I guess you could say that this was one out of the thousands of obscure little bands worldwide that arose in the wake of new wave music in the early eighties. Qua Dance has a sound that fits right in with all the Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure or X-Mal Deutschland type of influential wave bands. Nevertheless, they do sound quite dark, minimalistic and use electronic sounds, but overall they do make pop songs. It's not entirely groundbreaking, but I'm sure people investigating every small wave band from the eighties are going to be happy with this (especially from Holland).

Get it HERE

VA - Risonanze/3 - Evocazioni Musicali di Temi Biblici -1979- (Tape, Edizione Paoline), Italy

After Risonanze 2 which was posted earlier on the blog, here we have the third and last in the series. Risonanze was published through papal record label Paoline from the Vatican and was based on biblical themes. The composers of the music were Ennio Morricone, Egisto Macchi, Gino Marinuzzi, Armando Trovaioli, Miriam Bordoni and Luigi Zito. These compositions were surely not primarily created as biblical themes, but gathered for this particular series and perhaps renamed. I'm sure most pieces are a lot older than 1979 as well. Very strange music history indeed.

If I compare the two Risonanze volumes I think that the first one is a bit more diverse and less classical in its approach. This one sticks far more to some sort of traditional biblical theme than the other. The pieces tend more towards classical and folk music, but nevertheless create imaginitave cinematographical atmospheres. Some of the songs have electronic sounds, whilst others have choirs of sacral voices. Ofcourse many of these Italian composers are undoubtedly some of the best in existence so this is beautiful music. Who has volume one of the series?

Get it HERE

Donated by Kim


Also wanted to say that these coming months I will have some truly in-cre-di-ble posts coming and you will love it! Stay tuned!

Theo Loevendie Consort - Chess! -1972- (LP, BASF), Netherlands

This record is most likely the first real jazz album I've put on the blog so far, but it's a real classic in its genre. Theo Loevendie is a Dutch jazz clarinetist and composer and has been one of the key figures in Dutch jazz and improvisation since the sixties. In the early seventies Loevendie created two albums under the name Theo Loevendie Consort: Chess and Mandela (both have been reissued on a CD which is also out of print).

The Theo Loevendie Consort is basically a Dutch supergroup of jazz and impro musicians. The group consisted of trombonist Willem van Manen, icon of Dutch jazz: saxophonist Hans Dulfer, bass clarinet wizard Harry Sparnaay (to be found on this blog), pianist Leo Cuypers, bass player Arjen Gorter, saxophonist Leo van Oostrom and drummer Martin van Duynhoven (who was also in Group 1850, one of the best psychedelic Dutch bands from the sixties and seventies). You can find all these musicians on countless albums over at Inconstant Sol, as well as more Loevendie stuff.

Chess! is an important album in the Dutch (free)jazz realm, but to my personal taste not the best effort you'd expect from a supergroup like this. I suppose it was hard for them to find the right balance between their melody foundations and free jazz outburst and the space everyone had within that division. But then again maybe that's exactly what they tried to do according to the liner notes, namely:  "Anthitheses, depicting a fight between worn-out traditions and the modern improvisation approach". For example the first piece chess is a nice combination of a simple happy melody and free jazz. The piece brasilia combines a Brazilian-like melody with chaotic saxophone bursts. All in all the whole is a cool example of Dutch free jazz and does grasp the groovy spirit of that particular time in Holland. Maybe it's just that one has too high expectations being confronted with a supergroup of this degree.

Get it HERE

Storm Bugs - Gift -1981- (Tape, Snatch Tapes), UK

This here is the third and last cassette by the great UK experimental electronic DIY home-taping duo Storm Bugs. Storm Bugs was formed in 1978 in London, by Philip Sanderson and Steven Ball. Between 1978-81 Storm Bugs released 3 cassettes on the Snatch Tapes label and two 7-inch records: the Table Matters EP and the Metamorphose single. Storm Bugs created music comparable to bands like Throbbing Gristle or early Cabaret Voltaire. Snatch Tapes is a prime example of the British DIY sound of the late seventies and early eighties and gained a legendary status among fans of the experimental home-taping culture. It also released the first David Jackman (aka Organum) cassettes. You should read this piece written on UK cassette culture by Philip Anderson himself.

Although most of the Storm Bugs and Snatch Tapes material has been reissued, this cassette contains unrereleased tracks. With that being said I strongly recommend you to support Storm Bugs and Snatch Tapes related music by purchasing it at their bandcamp or at VOD. More Snatch Tapes stuff here and here.

Enjoy!