Adventures in Neumusik and Eurock
Adventures in Neumusik and Eurock
An audio-visual journey through the 1970s/80s experimental/electronic Euro scene.
A new episode of The Fanzine Podcast has just been published and I am here to tell you all about it.
In 1973, a Californian by the name of Archie Patterson became so enthused by all the interesting underground European experimental/electronic music he hearing that he started a fanzine dedicated to it, called Eurock. It lasted forty issues, through 1990. In 1979, a Brit by the name of David Elliott felt much the same way and, in part inspired by Eurock but also by the DIY spirit of punk, started his own zine Neumusik. While it only lasted six issues, until 1982, it grew during that time to over seventy pages and set David off exploring Europe to interview many of the artists in person.
What kind of artists are we talking about? Some of them you may know, like Can, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Kluster, Nektar, Neu!, Heldon, or Chrome. Others you may never have heard of, like Asmus Tietchens, Art Zoyd III, or Shub Niggurath. All of them were at the forefront of musical creativity towards the end of the 20th Century, and Eurock and Neumusik were at the forefront of the fanzines writing about them, interviewing them, and cataloguing their culture. Patterson grew a distribution service and began publishing books; he still posts twice weekly about this and other music on his Facebook. Elliot started making music with his college friend Andrew Cox, set up a cassette label, and recently wrote an extensive book on the British pop music of 1984.
Archie and David have also each published a compendium of their zines, discussed further in this episode. The books are different in approach, but each of them - by nature of all the personal correspondence and, for David, the one-on-one interviews in living rooms, studios, and cafes across Europe - offers an insider/outsider’s perspective on the development of some of the 20th Century’s most interesting music.
You can get Eurock: European Rock & The Second Culture (above left) from here. And Neumusik: the Complete Edition from here.
Archie’s archived web site, very much of the early 2000s html and quite lovable for that additional sense of DIY webzine culture (it’s how I hosted I ijamming.net for years), is here, loaded with additional information and links to further reading, listening and viewing.
For a further sense of Archie’s musical adventures, You can watch a trailer for his documentary film Music Is Life below, and the DVD is available for purchase from here.
As for David, you can read more about his musical “career” with MFH, and then Pump, at his web site. I love the photos archived of the duo’s early days, which bring back so many memories of that era of bedroom music. The same with his cassette label YHR which, as David’s reputation spread, began putting out rare/lost/live music by some of his heroes, including Cluster & Farnbauer, Conrad Schnitzler & Wolf Sequenza and Asmus Tietchens.
Cassettes were such an incredibly important part of DIY/posts-punk music dissemination (just as they were for hip-hop), and though sales were inherently limited, they offered that sense of “instant release” (in all senses) that some people get now from online streaming platforms, except that cassettes offered complete control of the artistic process. It’s great to see that they’re making a comeback.
David was kind enough to send me his book 1984: British Pop’s Dividing Year. It is as deep and thorough as I’d expect and looks like an amazing read; I so hope to get to it soon but let me endorse it for its presentation and evident research-based writing/opinions in the meantime. Rather than sending you to the jungle, David is selling it directly for just £10 (plus postage) from his own web site.
Meantime, you can listen to the Episode 30 of The Fanzine Podcast from here, which will also lead you to the other streaming platforms, from the Apple Pods widget up above, or from this apparently popular streaming platform below.
As we discuss on the show, the music that started in the late sixties on the far fringes of progressive and experimental rock became more electronic in the mid-1970s, playing a major role in the birth of hip-hop, techno and EDM. And many of the artists of today who might have found their way into Eurock or Neumusik of yesteryear are to be found in fields of music often categorized by streaming platforms and record shops alike as electronic, ambient, or experimental, and often as all three.
Whether you are thoroughly immersed in this music or just looking for recommendations, you need guidance, and many such guides can be found right here on Substack. Jeff Conklin runs a page called Ambient Audiophile, “a place where the rock and roll hall of fame is completely meaningless,” and one from which he leads you to instead his weekly Mixcloud show The Trailhead, a name always likely to get my attention, as is its beautiful “home” picture of a mountain range. (Which range is that, Jeff? I gather you live in Poughkeepsie but this does not look like the Catskills.) His most recent 2-hr show, Episode 149, feels to me liking an aural journey through a modern issue of Eurock/Neumusik, featuring the likes of TwoPine, Pure Waves, Frunk29 and other acts I have never heard of but would be happy to have in my CD collection. His Substack page not only gives full track listing but exact timestamps for those who do want to follow through on the artists.
As an example of how this guidance process can provide more than background listening or casual reading, let me tell you a short story. A couple of weeks ago, on a train journey back from NYC, I sought out some Japanese, electronic/ambient, preferable female-made music to accompany the book Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, part of my compulsory reading for the Introduction to World Literature course I am taking to consciously expand my oeuvre. The book, set in Tokyo in case you don’t know about it – and you may well be ahead of me on this one as it was rightfully a best-seller – is just wonderful, “creepy and charming” as my Professor succinctly noted.
Convenience Store Woman is also very much a book about our subservience to a social network, conveniently overlapping with my Sociology course, and while it predates our truly digital age, I felt the need to listen to a Japanese, preferably Tokyo-based electronic/ambient artist to accompany the reading/train journey. I found it almost immediately through the Flow State Substack’s recent recommendation of Sachi Kobayashi, who sets out to make music that depicts via sound its influences: for example, on Melodies in the Garden, she says she “tried to make music with elements of nature such as flowers, leaves, water, and sunlight,” and she succeeded: it’s blissful.
But for the purpose of the rather twisted Convenience Store Woman, I turned instead to Kobayashi’s album Damage, from 2023, “a trip through the mind of a mentally ill man and the hardships before him.” Suitably haunting but not unpleasantly so, the project, so she writes on her Bandcamp page, developed from a single sound, and led her to think of it as a soundtrack. “I thought of a number of cinematic scenes, so I developed a story and created a fictional movie.” In time, she also made a short-form animated video “in a format called "Sukatto-kei," which is popular on YouTube in Japan,” and in case this all sounds like exploitation of other people’s mental health problems, “my thought while creating this story is that I want you to take the necessary steps in case of an emergency.” I could not have come up with more perfect music for Convenience Store Woman. Suitably for today’s post, it is also available on cassette.
It’s important to note that during the period covered by Eurock and Neumusik, a solo female artist would have found it very hard to get a foot in the door of this musical world, and while society has thankfully changed considerably since then, there is still a need for affirmative action. The artist marine eyes, whose new album to belong I heartily recommend in its own right, hosts a Substack called Cloud Collecting, on which “I share 3 question interviews on creativity with women & gender expansive artists.” She also offers “‘women of ambient’ monthly mixes” to her paid subscribers.
Gorgeously simple and inviting in their design, Cloud Collecting recently led me to Montreal’s Lyndsie Alguire, whose work “makes the ethereal world tangible through music and photos” and whose new album ‘time is but the drawing of a sword’ comes with an accompanying interactive game. I thrive on this kind of multi-media approach to creativity and hope you do too. PS: Lyndsie’s music is mostly available on cassette also.
No post in which I discuss this music would be complete without coming back to Stephan Kunze’s newsletter, however. A list of the musical genres he covers under the umbrella of Zen Sounds runs to eight, including the likes of “sound art and music concrète,” but as he caveats, he is by no means limited to them. As such, you should not be surprised that recent posts come with titles like “A Guide to Berlin’s Experimental Music Scene,” “Life without Streaming” (Stephan recently gave up his Spotify account like me but, unlike me, did not convert to Qobuz), “Balearic Arthouse Daydreams” and “the New New Music.” (He also compiled a mixtape of The Cure’s “experimental side,” linking to the songs individually via YouTube.) His latest post “Music for Haunted Hair Salons” is a must.
But the one I want to leave you with is the “3 of the Strangest Albums Ever Recorded,” which came with the sub-header “Play these at your own risk.” Noting for my part that two of them hailed from Germany and one from the UK, that two were recorded during Neumusik’s period of zine existence and that the other carried the name of the first German musician David Elliott interviewed, I reached out to David, and sure enough, he recognized two of the albums immediately. He had this to say about the first of them.
“Yes, very familiar with Kluster's Klopfzeichen. Less because it's a great album, and more because it was the first real outing of three artists I love (Conrad Schnitzler on the one hand and Roedelius & Moebius on the other) and partly because it was like the holy grail - just so rare! In fact, I still don't have the original release.” If you’re interested, David, there are three copies available on Discogs: the cheapest will only set you back a thousand dollars or so.
Thanks to our digital age, however, we can all now at least access the “music”. To which, yes, Klopfzeichen is strange; listen for yourself up above. As Stephan writes on Zen Sounds, “Kluster made ‘industrial’ music, long before that genre label existed. Recorded in December 1969 in a Cologne studio, Klopfzeichen still sounds completely alien today. Mind you, this is ten years before Einstürzende Neubauten, five years before Throbbing Gristle, and three years before Cabaret Voltaire.”
It was, however, more than a half century after Luigi Russolo published his Futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises, and then set about making the first “noise” instruments that sought to replicate sounds of the modern age. Russolo’s career as an all-round artist, including his influential paintings and writings, the 21st Century recordings and performances using reconstructions of his intonarumori instruments, and noting his ties with Fascism as per just about all the Futurists, will form this Sunday’s long read. I hope you’ll find it as fascinating as I did to research and write.
Until then, if you listen to the Fanzine Podcast on a streaming platform, I invite you to like, review and/or subscribe. And talking of subscribing, this is still very much a labour of love, and unlike the UB40 albums of that name, no one is getting rich off of it. Your upgrade would be enormously appreciated. And if you’re already a patron of these Wordsmith arts, your humble scribe thanks you.