Berlin 61 – 89 / Wall Of Sound is not an ordinary compilation. It is closer to a concept album, referring both to a chapter in History and a musical assemblage which resounds like a continental echo to Phil Spector’ s American pop Wall of Sound.
In this make-belief soundtrack, avant-garde rock and futuristic pop express themselves, sometimes spangled with cabaret reminiscences and veiled with the ghost of Kurt Weill. Extreme and intense music, concocted during those three decades « at the foot of the Wall » and in front of it by creators who love danger and risk taking. Alongside pasionarias such as Nico and Nina Hagen, we can find German bands. Faust, Agitation Free, Harmonia, Can, Die Krupps, Neu !, Einstürzende Neubauten, their Swiss cousins the Young Gods and all the others are aesthetes, pioneers of underground culture which tamed electronics with an acute sense of efficiency. True inhabitants of the city, Berliners by adoption or fascinated by the brilliance of its new look urbanity, they often mix the art of melody to a Bruitist (noise music) approach. Their music flirts with trance and resonant dramatic art which can be found in the main protagonists of the Bruitist and electro scenes of today.
As it was said as early as the end of 1961, the sixties were, in West Germany, the main home for this different rock in which suddenly all was allowed, as if the hideous concrete snake was the metaphor of an ultimate musical border and the theatre of unprecedented experiments, based on new sensations as mind-blowing as they are machine like. The movement accelerated during the seventies: still wounded, Germany was getting back on its feet, and its cosmic music was starting to sound like a sublime alternative to an English or American rock which had become too obvious. Sometimes mundanely nicknamed krautrock, kosmische Musik gave way to the eighties and the technoid and neue Deutsche Welle new pop trends, often envied by their counterparts throughout the world as it foreshadowed the electro music of the year 2000. Even though all the bands and musicians were not originally from Berlin, all were plugged into Berlin electricity and benefited from this fabulous energy and its unique way of life, between claimed Bohemia and constant uprising.
Dangerous, sublime, incandescent, fuelled by a vivid mythology in which Nick Cave, David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Brian Eno meet, Berlin is an artistic city par excellence, a place of all extremes. During those three decades marked by the Wall, in which she was a world metropolis because American and French as much as German, Russian and English, Berlin established herself as the capital of an « other rock », as important and everlasting as the one which was born in the middle of the previous century, somewhere in the south of the U.S.A.
