This is a much-talked about (in the day) record that came out in the late-70s from Germany. The “Krautrock” scene was now gone, replaced by a newer school of experimental bands like Einsterzende Neubauten (of course) and this group.

Of course I had wanted to pick up on this band before, but hearing their later stuff (i.e. the album Alles Ist Gut) didn’t really fry my bacon. Pretty much proto-EBM material with grunting vocals and minimally sequenced synth that paved the way for bands like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb, etc. Maybe that stuff occasionally recalled Suicide, except without the tunefulness and arty ideas… But then I heard Christo Haas, a very good musician who played keyboards in Crime and the City Solution, was in an early version of this group, and I kept hearing that the first album (which I’m talking about) was a noisy post-punk classic. So I was a bit curious, but still my memory of Alles Ist Gut made me think it would still be a bit underwhelming as I find alot of dance music is (quite frankly…)

So when I managed to find this record I wasn’t prepared for what I was gonna get here. Dare I say it exceeded my expectations greatly. This version of DAF didn’t have a singer yet, there ARE guitars here, and bass and drums and lots of analog synth squiggles over the top. And it sounds as wired as if you’re witnessing this band play live.

And I’m under the conclusion this whole record might have been culled from an extremely long live jam, kind of like Clock DVA’s White Souls in Black Suits. There isn’t a track listing and no separation on the grooves either, but there seems to be alot of fragments with alot of silence in between. But the playing is so inexplicably intense here it makes anything on Metal Box sound as dull as the Goo Goo Dolls. I’ve no idea if this has been reissued on CD, but it’s definitely worth looking for especially if you like Einsterzende Neubauten and other bands from Germany of that time…