Science Fiction Park Bundesrepublik / Various

• Track Listing

Cache Cache presents a compilation featuring rare German home-recorded tape tracks from the 1980s. Curated by Felix Kubin. "In the summer of 1982, in a cottage in the Bavarian forest, a 13-year-old boy sits with his brother on the sofa and stares at the television. What he sees will transform his life. In rapid, revue-like sequences, young costumed people jump around in front of a painted background. The entire spectacle might be a direct transmission from Mars. The music accompanying all this is so radically new that the terminology to describe it doesn't exist yet. Most of all, it is unexpectedly bizarre, minimalistic and electronic. The astonishing performance is garnished by four amateurish dancers obviously assigned to the musicians by a decree of the TV broadcaster. Nothing fits together, yet the combination is pure genius. His little brother is drafted to write down the names of the bands Palais Schaumburg, Der Plan, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, Lorenz Lorenz, Der Kurper und die Seele (trans. 'The Body and the Soul'). Back home in Hamburg, as if possessed, the boy begins to experiment with a synthesizer, a home organ, and a voice and tape recorder. He is not the only one to begin explorations in this direction. The entire Federal Republic of Germany is just at the boiling point. A new form of home music is coming into existence. It has nothing to do with violin-playing children, scratchy sweaters and well-combed relatives listening on the sofa, but rather combines the fears with the dark abyss of industrial society. Remarkably, it is the same industry that made the tools available to the raging youths: cheap Casio keyboards, synthesizers, drum computers, and four-track tape recorders. Suddenly, anyone can acquire his own means of production to use in protest against the industrial forces. In their freshly-established home studios the protagonists practice the new underground music, the "undirected aggression of liberated sounds," as Frank Apunkt Schneider expressed in his book Als die Welt noch unterging (trans. 'As the World Was Still Ending'). Everything that isn't nailed or riveted down is used as an instrument: baking trays, cartons, room lamps, toys, wooden flutes, whistles, cans, trays, record players, televisions, a doorbell, a telephone. Out of the living rooms of the nation drones an obsession with noise, sparing not even the children. And what became of that 13-year-old boy who sat in front of the television back then? He hasn't had a television for the last 25 years and is just now writing these lines. His enthusiasm for the cassette scene has remained to this day. And while collecting the pieces for this compilation, he had to keep pinching himself in the arm." -Felix Kubin; Artists include: Dit + Uta, Z.S.K.A., Neros Tanzende Elektropapste, Kleines Schwingvergnugen, Das Gluck, Andy Giorbino, Plastiktanz, CHBB, Eisenhauer, Holger Hiller, Wat Sanitar!, Cinema Verite, Lustige Mutanten, Pyrolator, x2, Twist Noir, Grune Rosen, Pierre Godot, Anadolu Bayramlari, Co-Mix, DIT, and Frank Schroder.