FRG underground-live the weird beauty!

The myth, which ranks around the music of the new German wave, is roughly as follows: at the end of the 70s, in the early 80s, the German -speaking music landscape, until then, experienced a veritable explosion of the forms. It was cheerfully experimented with everything that was good for sound generation; Hundreds of bands and projects shot out of the ground, in West Berlin, Hamburg Düsseldorf, but also in many other cities and even in Hanover. The magic only lasted briefly, in 1982 the singer Markus initiated the end with his hits single “I want fun”. What was left of the NDW was idiotor -friendly Federal Republican pop music, system stabilizing and penetrating. But the niches were continued, and everything that tried to connect to the Postpunk in this country used the famous first wave.

Many bands that worked at the time have now moved to the edge of pophistic consciousness, if not forgotten. The Hamburg label Wallpaper Records has been bringing albums out of the beautiful edges of pop history for a few years and thus snatches it.

Starting from three chords, something is mixed up here that looks lustfully cramped.

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Most recently, a large part of the overall work of the Hanoverian band of Moderne Man and other albums of the band Syp. Both bands sound very different, but have two similarities: firstly, the radical freedom of the form. Both the modern man and syphe can be heard that they don’t worry about genre boundaries, at least no concerned. Secondly, you have added punk as a starting point – and added certain strands and thus anticipated later.

The band of modernity man brought it to only two albums: “80 days at sea” (1980) and “Unmodern” (1982). In addition, there is now a new compilation “Jugend research”, which gathers the singles, EPS and demos from 1980 to 1983. “Youth researches” is also the best conceivable title for this music. This is the name of a young technology competition that the magazine “Stern” had invented in the 1960s. In the case of music from the modern man, the fun of experimenting, abstruse and lovingly shiefs quickly turns to the listener and listener 45 years after her creation.

You can get on well with the “disco song”, which, loved by John Peel and played several times in his famous program on BBC, talk to a stoic bass and offbeat guitar every day: “At home, I send myself/ then I go to the discotheque/ I pull all the girls on/ I would like to put up with”. Quasi a German transmission of Gang of Fours Song »at Home He Feels Like A Tourist«. Everyday life is often an issue in these texts, which, if you like, then appear cryptically again in their urgent banality. The everyday and general is rather removed in these songs. In the »telephone song«, for example, it is about calling somewhere but choosing.

Musically, this is formerly postpunk. Based on three chords, a little is mixed up here, reggae and dub, above all, which does not ensure a relaxed atmosphere, but because all of this is presented minimally in a minimal manner, seems rather lustfully tense up. In this sense, the modern one was closer to The Pop Group, which they probably knew than to The Clash.

In 1982 the last album “Unmodern” appeared. This was better produced and ska-heavy after landlords, and in the course of the NDW boom, labels started to be interested in modernity, in 1984 the WDR transferred a concert by the band. Nevertheless, the end was still in the same year. What remains is a collection of miraculous songs that no longer sound “modern” today, but are always surprising and full of weird beauty.

The band syphe around the singer and guitarist Harry Rag drove it out musically. The band is known and loved for crispy art punk crackers such as “Back to the concrete”, one of the most-covered and cited German punk songs, and “industrial girls”. But on the second page of the first album, the band drifted into the musical wonderland using tape loops and Krautrock-Deskel.

The plates “PST” (1980), the fourth album “Syph” (1981) and the compilation “Punkraut (1978 to 1981)” have now been re -published on wallpaper. The song shape is still dominated on »PST«, although the reduced post-punk aesthetics with forced, i.e. artistic amateurism is put into the wind slope. This can deliberately be poorly played guitar solos that run across the whole piece, weird Ooooh-Oooh songs or a bass run or a reef that comes half a blow behind the drums. But it is counted here with “one, two, three, four”.

It is different on the self -titled fourth album. The three short pieces and the two 18 minutes long “The neighbor (long version)” and “Little Nemo” do not leave much left by the early work. “The neighbor”, for example, can be heard on “PST” in a three-minute variant. A repetitive, military streak remains on »Syph«, which runs through the entire album in different forms. With her fourth album, SYPH may not have produced inaudible music, but one who doesn’t care about whether someone listens or not. In this sense, too, all of this is more punk than in the most psychedelic and full moments, let’s say, the dead trousers, which still exists.

The modern man: “80 days at sea”, “unmodern”, “youth research – singles, eps & demos 1980–1983” (all wallpaper/indigo)
SYPH: “PST”, “Syph”, “Punkraut 1978–1981” (all wallpaper/indigo)