Silberland Vol 3 The Ambient Side Of Kosmische Musik 1972– 1986, 2025 CD / 2– LP / digital
Voyage, Dieter Schütz, 2025 CD / LP / digital
Inventions, Von Deyen/Schütz, CD / LP / digital
It is a commonplace to comment that German rock and pop punched above its weight – the long game that has resulted in the immense influence of Can and Kraftwerk on subsequent popular musics. Reading the breathless Bureau B press releases, I could only wonder what alchemy transformed the mundane into the kosmische.
From a fan’s point of view, it is an understandable urge to wish to curate and revive “hidden gems” and “overlooked masterpieces”. The drive of capital to create new products, new tastes and new markets coincides happily with this when the past can readily be cannibalised and repackaged. You do wonder though how much is archaeology and how much is cosplay. The use of the blanket term kosmische seems a cartwheel that flips the dismissive and racist term krautrock into a sort of positive, but still a term that homogenizes and simplifies a more complex and heterogenous musical scene.
I suspect that the laws of probability mean that there must be a scene for this sort of music – where middle aged men signal their tastes to each other via t shirts and carrier bags of merch – but I have no wish to put the effort into the fieldwork necessary to locate it, and can only guess at the types of nostalgia that drive it.
There are plenty of familiar names on Silberland – Eno, Moebius, Roedelius and the rest. While there are moments of ambience and minimal sound, it really isn’t that minimalist or ambient. Pop sensibilities and the desire to create an atmosphere mean that these pieces cleave more to the world of soundtracks.
The technology that runs through all of these discs is sequencing and there is a pleasant buzz to be had from listening to pieces that sound like the intros to old science programmes on the TV, but also a sense there were limited options created by the technology – set the arpeggio, wiggle the filters, put something noisy in, take it out again, fade.
The two Schutz discs take the use of the sequencer a bit further into the mainstream – rather as if A– Ha had peddled exotica – but the sense is that the journey they were taking us on in the early 80s was not into the cosmos, but on a cruise round the Med.
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Stuart Riddle
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