Anyone who’s followed electronic music in any more than a cursory fashion has heard of the Berlin School, which was founded by bands and artists like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Ash Ra Tempel in Berlin (duh) in the 1970s. With its blipping sequencers, echo boxes, wandering lead synths and guitar, and syrupy chordal drones, it’s proven to be fertile ground, whether you want to slavishly imitate it, take it in new directions, or just make fun of it.
I’ve been on a rare (for me) Berlin kick recently (16+2 guesses, with coffee table book in bright red slipcase, as to why!) and so I’ve decided to spend the month of July focusing on artists, albums, and tracks that lean heavily on Berlin tropes. Mostly I’ll feature albums or large chunks of albums by artists who wear their love of Berlin on their sleeve, but later in the month I’ll feature single tracks from artists who merely dip their feet in the waters once in a while, whether to honor or to mock.
We open Berlin July with the music of John Dyson’s famed Berlin-meets-UK project Wavestar, with tracks from four albums spanning a quarter century. In the second hour, I’ll play most of an album that’s so Berlin it comes with a tram ticket to Karlshorst: Over There by Sequentia Legenda, aka French musical explorer Laurent Schieber.
Please join us in Slack chat, Second Life, or just listen to the stream and have some guilty fun listening to the stuff we all loved when we were little, even if we don’t admit it now.
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