PRICE:
$17.00
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Arger mit der Unsterblichkeit
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
BB 114CD BB 114CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
10/23/2012

In 1988, in a club in Munich, German pop legend Andreas Dorau heard a kind of music which was completely new to him. He remembers it like this: "While we were producing Demokratie, acid house kicked off. It hit me right between the eyes. It was the most incredible thing for me!" Things really took off shortly afterwards, when somebody in England came up with the notion of looping and editing recorded music by other bands. Dorau: "You could pick out your favorite passages from a song, choose the best of the '50s, '60s and '70s and build more or less the perfect song." Endless possibilities! Production techniques were also advancing apace. In 1991 a sampler capable of sampling two minutes cost around 300 Deutsche Marks. Just a few years earlier, such a device would have set the buyer back 10,000 Marks. And so Ärger mit der Unsterblichkeit (Trouble with Immortality) was fashioned in the living room of Dorau's new musical companion, his congenial partner Tommi Eckardt. Eckardt played in a band by the name of Die alternativen Arschlöcher (trans. "The Alternative Assholes") and would later find international fame as one-half of the pop duo 2raumwohnung. A new era, a wonderful time. Musical recordings could be liberally snipped and spliced back together, thus creating brilliant new songs of one's own -- albums emerged from living rooms. It suddenly became possible to produce a proper album at home with equipment costing 1200 Marks. Ärger mit der Unsterblichkeit could well be one of the first German pop albums to have been produced in this manner. Ärger mit der Unsterblichkeit was supposed to be Dorau's final regular album for Ata Tak. But why? Dorau: "I would have been happy to stay with Ata Tak. But the indie music story was growing increasingly perverse. There were boxes for 'indie.' Electronic music wasn't allowed in. Indie meant guitars. So I had to move to a major, where my records would be labelled 'pop.' Ata Tak was an indie. And they wouldn't have put my records in the indie section. All of a sudden, 'indie' had ceased to be synonymous with independently produced music, it had become a genre. I would have liked to have stayed at Ata Tak." And how was the record received? Dorau: "Our rave rigmarole left live audiences nonplussed. Once the album was released, I was seen as some kind of sick character." Others have been tarred with the same brush, have they not? Often, all too often, the best. Includes two bonus tracks.