While I have to confess to not previously being familiar with the work of cult Swiss electronic band Die Weltraumforscher, they’ve certainly spawned some high-profile fans in the form of Mouse On Mars, Felix Kubin and Yello’s Dieter Meier, all artists who clearly share Die Weltraumforscher’s taste for the absurd and surreal. Essentially the solo project of the enigmatic Christian Pfluger, over the last 30 years Die Weltraumforscher have built up a discography that spans more than 30 albums, as well as films, stories and countless illustrations documenting the band’s own self-contained universe of characters. Right on time for its thirtieth anniversary, this joint vinyl-only release from A Tree In A Field and Planam sees DW’s 1981 cassette debut album ‘Herzschlag Erde’ being re-released for the first time alongside its previously unreleased ‘lost’ follow-up collection from the following year ‘Verdunkelt Die Sinne’. While both albums share the same distinctly eccentric aesthetic though, they manage to capture two distinctly different sides of the band’s earlier musical explorations. In many senses, ‘Herzschalg Erde’ feels more like a personal scrapbook of musical experiments and sketches more than anything else, with the majority of its 18 tracks being brief audio vignettes.
At times it almost feels like you’re listening to a particularly eccentric library recordings collection more than anything else, with opener ‘Der Traum Der Welt’ offering a brief flit through metronomic rock-meets-chacha beats, whistling and pitched-up chipmunk female Euro vocals, before the forbidding ’4891′ offers up a furious blast of field-recorded power tools, the faint hint of sinister orchestration and chugging motorik rhythms lurking beneath, and ‘Letzer Gesang’ unleashes samples of an enraged man screaming German over what sounds like a woman teaching a dance class and ticking Casiotone rhythms. That said however, there’s also the occasional wander towards more ‘developed’ compositions to be found amidst the brief vignettes, with ‘Hinter Sieben Monden’ offering up a dreamy glide through delicate woodwinds, tinkling xylophones and chiming guitars that’s almost comparatively epic at four minutes in length. In many senses, the four tracks collected here that constitute ‘Verdunkelt Die Sinne’ see Pfluger continuing to explore these broader canvases, with the eerie ‘Geisterbeschworung’ building ominous atmosphere amidst slow, clattering percussion, disembodied sounding spoken intonations and humming bass tones, before ‘Mystik Auf Hugein’ sees film conversation drifting in as though from the next room over a swirl of shimmering organs and feathery guitar tones. While both of the albums collected here won’t exactly be for everyone, fans of obscure early-eighties European electronics will delight in this classy reissue (complete with 20 page large format booklet).
Chris Downton
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