Electronic Sound July 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 19

of lesser known but equally mesmerising
acts. It’s curated by Death In Vegas
founder Richard Fearless, who has
painstakingly worked his way through
the label’s entire archive to assemble a
showcase that seamlessly wends its way
through old and new material. Fearless’
‘Kollektion’ follows three previous
volumes that saw Tim Gane, Lloyd Cole
and Palais Schaumberg’s Holger Hiller
digging into the Bureau B crates.

VARIOUS
ARTISTS

Kollektion 4: Bureau B
(Compiled By Richard Fearless)
BUREAU B

The debut album from this IrishFranco-German trio enchants the
darker side of Berlin’s underbelly
After initially occupying itself with
reissues of European pop and easy
listening records by the likes of James
Last, Hamburg’s Bureau B label quickly
moved into releasing rare tracks from
the German post-punk Neue Deutsche
Welle scene. Deals with Sky Records
and the seminal cassette imprint Ata
Tak positioned Bureau B as a destination
for otherwise out of print examples
of German music that has become
legendary in its scope and influence.
Later still, the label’s careful approach
to curating the legacy of these bands
allowed them to put out fresh material
by artists such as Faust and Andreas
Dorau.
A glance at the track listing for this
compilation highlights the enviable
breadth of Bureau B’s operation. Across
25 cuts and two discs, the roll of names
included here is impressive – Conny
Plank, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim
Roedelius, Der Plan – alongside a host

The Neue Deutsche Welle scene arrived
in the wake of what is perhaps unfairly
dubbed krautrock, and on tracks like
Thomas Dinger’s ‘Für Dich’ and Moebius
& Beerbohm’s ‘Doppelschnitt’, it’s still
possible to discern the long shadow of
NDW’s predecessor. Unlike contemporary
scenes in the UK and the US, NDW
isolated and almost venerated the
characteristics of what came before –
namely the chugging, hypnotic rhythms
that we now call motorik, coupled with
dimensions of nothing less than astral
proportions – and riffed off that groove
endlessly.
While bands like Der Plan and Jaki
Liebezeit’s jazz-inflected Phantom Band
ploughed a similarly noisy furrow to
Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire,
melodic dexterity was never far away
among many of these artists. The
effect is to link the music back to an
essentially formalist European classical
tradition. Cluster’s ‘Sowiesoso’ does
it through hazy ambient textures and

Asmus Tietchens through a strain of
synthpop that could have been an offcut from Depeche Mode’s first album,
while Wolfgang Riechmann’s evocative
‘Abendlicht’ is symphonic in its scope.
Elsewhere, Günter Schickert’s ‘Suleika’
could be a particularly meditative
Fearless track from a buried Death In
Vegas album, melding trippy beats,
a chiming guitar passage looped into
infinity, and a restless, noisy distortion
serpent lurking in the space Schickert
leaves in between. Krautrock hangers-on
Faust do the same on the vast expanses
of ‘Kundalini Tremolo’. Ever true to their
name, they sound like they are steadily
honouring a dark and fatal pact with the
devil.
‘Kollektion 4’ concludes with a sequence
that ranges from a collaboration between
Automat and US no wave queen Lydia
Lunch to another dirge-like Faust cut,
by which point the beat and melodic
sensibility has morphed into a sluggish,
dubbed-out spaciness full of drones and
reverb. But whether the tracks were
located deep in the archives or pulled
fresh off the shelf, there’s a uniform
sense of exploration here – both from
Richard Fearless as he determinedly
worked his way through the Bureau B
catalogue and from the creators of the
music he’s placed under his discerning
spotlight.
MAT SMITH

FAUST Pic: Petra Glaeser