2CD : Berlin 61/89 - Wall Of Sound (Schaullmauer)

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.

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