The Caribbean’s TVD Takeover continues this morning with an open letter from guitarist, Dave Jones:
Josh Kretzmer plays in the very excellent band Mariage Blanc. The other day he wrote Matt Byars an email…
Josh,
Matt forwarded your email to me. Your stated search for a new musical frontier brought one word to mind: Germany. It’s been about 10 years since my friend Barrett played me Tago Mago, my first encounter with Krautrock. I’m still thankful to him. Krautrock, a problematic term I won’t tackle here, opened a door for me; not only to new bands and new songs, but to a new musical paradigm. There are times it’s the only music that makes any sense to me.
I’ve got a couple of ideas for your ears, and I hope they enjoy them.
I’ll start where Barrett did, with CAN. I looked around Youtube quite a bit for some live video, and while it’s there none of the clips really worked for me as an introduction to CAN. I chose an audio only clip of their song “One More Night” off the record Ege Bamyasi:
“One more thinking you should / One more thinking you’re right”
Next up Einstürzende Neubauten, my current only band that matters. I’ve seen them described as “post-industrial”, but I don’t know enough about industrial music to verify that one way or the other. Their early stuff involves a lot of banging on shit. They expanded and refined their sound as the years went on and I have to say I like their later music more. This clip of their song “Youme & Meyou” is from a 2004 show at the Palast Der Republik in Berlin and seeing it was the first time I’d ever gotten a good look at them play. Many of the sounds that I always thought were synthesizers or sequencers are still, in essence, just them banging on shit:
“No more tassels on the hotel key / a phone line, a laptop / and a box of tangerines…”
Kraftwerk is on my short list for greatest band of all time. This very swinging clip comes from a 1981 show:
“It’s more fun to compute…”
And I’ll conclude with Harmonia. A band started by Michael Rother of Neu! and Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Möbius of Cluster, it must be considered among the greatest side projects of all time. I could not find a clip of them performing in their prime so back to audio only here, this is “Ueber Ottenstein”, a track off their Live 1974 album:
Happy listening, Josh, and can’t wait to play with you guys this April at U Street Music Hall.
—Dave
Check out Mariage Blanc’s latest at their Official Site.
