Heinz & Franz was a home recording project by Heinz Havemeister and Frank Bretschneider. The recordings took place in 1987 and 1988 in the DIY studio Sonnenklang in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), always at night. The mixing desk was self-built. 50 copies of the tape were released on Bretschneider’s label klangFarBe. Heinz Havemeister was a guitarist with the Bolschewistische Kurkapelle Schwarz-Rot and co-editor of the art samizdat LIANE. Frank Bretschneider is considered an electronic pioneer of the GDR underground scene…

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“…The band Neuntage appeared in 1986 during the last blackout phase of the GDR. Its founding fathers came from the early East Berlin punk scene. They had found common ground in projects such as Medusa Brahma, Die zeitweilige Erscheinung or the Mahlsdorfer Wohnstuben Orchester. From there, a short tunnel led straight into the black light of Neuntage, the coldest star in the lowhanging synth-pop sky above East Berlin. Hardly any other post-punk band in the GDR was blessed with such an unconstrained and incidental…

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tapetopia is a series of releases based on cassettes from East Germany’s 80s underground, particularly from the East Berlin ‘Mauerstadt’ music scene, featuring original layouts and track lists. For over 30 years after their initial “release” the music on these tapes was neither available on vinyl nor CD, but they were important statements in the canon of the GDR subculture. Despite the miniscule number of original cassettes in circulation at the time many of the bands were popular in countercultural circles, a factor that…

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