KUNSTKOPF - 7 STÜCKE 1998 (LP)

"The open spaces in East Berlin that emerged for a handful of years in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin wall, have shown to be a fertile ground for musical and artistic experimentators to develop their play and showcase their findings, and to work together in ways that would have been impossible anywhere else. In retrospect, the reductionist brand of improvisation that has become known as Echtzeitmusik (real-time music) seems to overshadow other achievements, thus in hindsight it now is time to resurrect groups and artists that have worked at the non-classifiable fringes of what was already a sub-cultural scene. One such group was Kunstkopf, formed in 1995 by Manfred Machlitt, Dirk Specht and Taymur Streng, and joined by Patrick Laschet shortly after, all musicians coming from very different backgrounds. Streng and Machlitt had been part of the underground electronic music scene in East Berlin. Streng had played in the dark-wave group Neun Tage Alt and at the same time experimented with synthesizers and sound-making devices in his home in the outskirts of Berlin, while also establishing contacts with the academic avant-garde, e.g. with the electro-acoustic studio of the East Berlin Academy of Arts. Streng later worked as a librarian until his untimely death in 2022. Laschet and Specht, on the other hand, came from a West German post-industrial DIY cassette scene but had been living in West Berlin for some time. Specht lives in Cologne today and is a member of the Therapeutische Hörgruppe Köln." (label info)