Ornament & Verbrechen – Rotmaul-Tape / Die Gehirne – Ihre Großen Erfolge 1983-85

Play Loud!

Play Loud! proudly presents Tapetopia, a series of vinyl releases documenting East Germany’s underground tape culture of the ’80s. The first two volumes are a window on the vibrancy of this subculture:

On volume one, Ornament & Verbrechen inject a different perspective with their Rotmaul-Tape. A varied beast, its unusually polished production beams in your speakers, the vocals steeped in non-native English. The Bauhaus-like verve of the first track strikes you first – “Torture” — a slow crawl of a track, majestically brooding.

There’s an arrow-caught momentum of warring words, the drama brilliantly detailed in sharding frets and bulk wall creakings. The odd cybernetic voices and whirring symphonics of “The Death By Heroine Of Sid Vicious” adds a soporific slant with clanging metal highlights, as its slow thumping aorta is strangled to collapse.

Each track is a durgey orchestrated joy, fragmenting in squealing sax or clarinet, the synths crawling with darkwave melodics. “Sally”’s rain-soaked noir and Eyeless In Gaza-like delivery is caught in swishing accents and metal shivers, while “When I Am I Am Not”’s percussive mania spirals obsessively in your mind’s eye. Rotmaul-Tape is an album that impales you in post-punk bliss from start to finish, revels in the oppressive shadows that party propaganda tried to erase from existence.

By contrast, volume two of Tapetopia is brilliantly rough’n’ready, and typifies the DIY approach a lot of these bands shared, making original documents from next to nothing – often with no plan but a desire to change their circumstances, infect others with a glimmer of creative hope. Die Gehirne delivered Their Great Successes as an ideological antidote. The percussive pots’n’pans clattering away, that purrrfectly dirty lo-fi lividity of it all.

There was no chasing a pre-defined goal for Claus Löser and Florian Merkel, pictured on the cover with sharpened edges to each other’s necks. This film maker and photographer came together in their hometown of Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) to fill their living room with improvised action. The idea was to create something original; unique even, something that lived for the moment, plucked from the unpredictable wormhole of over-driven wares. You could say this was music that has a clear idea of what it doesn’t want to be, free from having to please.

Full of ulcerating urgency, waspy and battered natures, this kinetic sketchbook brims with ideas, a bewildering thirty-four tracks’ worth, in fact. There are brief glimpses of genius that textually tantalise, delve into the black arts of gain and feedback, and Ihre Großen Erfolge even contains an utterly shambolic “House Of Rising Sun” cover, with the looped laughter of the last track a fitting insult to the East German party line.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-

• Tapetopia 001 and 002 are available from Play Loud!.