A heralded legend in Germany, the music of ASMUS TIETCHENS isn’t as well known in the United States, except to Kosmische Musik and Krautrock enthusiasts. I went far too long in my life without knowing and having heard this man and his amazing music. Helping people everywhere to avoid the same fate is the BUREAU B label. They are currently in the midst of a thorough TIETCHENS reissue campaign based around the early years of TIETCHEN’s recording career, 1981-1983. The music he created during these years has been dubbed pseudo-pop and amounts to four records all released by the SKY RECORDS label. The refuse of those records, rejects or otherwise, have been gathered together to create DER FÜNFTE HIMMEL, or THE FIFTH SKY. It’s a little unclear as to whether or not any of these recordings have been released previously and in what way, but I believe most of them to be receiving daylight for the very first time, which is why we’re writing about it. Old new music.
This “pseudo-pop”, even these unwanted shards of it, is a dazzling batch of rhythmic electronic experimentation. This has to be the best odds n’ sods affair I have ever witnessed. Much of this music could easily be believed to be arcade music for a science fiction adventure game (though transferred at a much higher bit rate), or the soundtrack to a tense or exploratory passage from a late 70s or early 80s sci-fi film. There is a serious cinematic quality to much of the music found here, both the pleasant and rhythmic abstract “pop” songs, and the stranger, darker, tenser pieces. It’s somewhere between carousel music gone awry and YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS. Truly this music could have been made yesterday surrounded by the many (quite a few of which are really just so amazing) experiments of today’s electronic artists as we are. Artists melding pop to noise via their dalliances with real groove, twisted or not, and artists abstracting the pop in their music by interrupting the forces of melody and rhythm in it (and through the process creating noise and other experimental results) are winding up in territory that you will wind up in if you put this stuff in your ears. Ahead of his time no doubt, ASMUS TIETCHENS released some of the best German music of the 80s. Assembling together the radiant scraps of an amazing yesteryear, BUREAU B and MR. TIETCHENS have managed to also release some of the best German music, or any other kind of music, that I am bound to hear in 2014. Get lost in THE FIFTH SKY and be sure to get lost in SKY’s 1-4 as well, which BUREAU B has also kindly reissued. I’ve included some streams from SKY’s 1-4 below alongside the only streams (just snippets sadly) of DER FÜNFTE HIMMEL that I could find on the cybernet.
FROM SPAT EUROPA
FROM IN DIE NACHT
FROM LITIA
