tapetopia – Page 3 – Sea Urchin Editions

Mahlsdorfer Wohnstuben Orchester – M.W.O. 1987-1989

The year 1982 brought the encounter of René Glofke and Taymur Streng, also known as “Glofke” and “Strangler” in the local district chapter of the East Berlin punk scene. In Mahlsdorf, a suburb between Berlin and Strausberg, Taymur converted his large living room into an improvised recording studio; devices were modified, machines optimized. Many things he assembled himself by following wiring…

€ 12.00

Rosa Extra – Extrakte 1980-1984

From Henryk Gericke’s liner notes to this release:

…No other punk band in the GDR so clearly had a literary lineage. Rosa Extra would often use texts by poets who were friends with the band, thus turning poetry back into song. The musicians’ collaboration with the underground lyricist Bert Papenfuß, beyond Rosa Extra, would develop into an enduring common-law marriage. Papenfuß had an unrivalled gift of transforming the energy of punk rock and the liberal-experimental basic order of post-punk into a well-set chaos of words….

Tropenkoller 86-88

Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) was one of the GDR’s subcultural hubs in the late 1970s and 80s. The industrial city in Saxony produced an impressively wide informal cultural programme beyond state structures. Bands such as Die Gehirne, Knut Baltz Formation, Die Arroganten Sorben, Kartoffelschälmaschine, AG Geige or the projects of cassette label klangFarBe created a complex artistic environment, in which Tropenkoller ran its spiritual exercises from 1986 to 1989…

€ 12.00

Der Expander des Fortschritts – Urknall · Horde · Mensch

Der Expander des Fortschritts was founded in 1986. The “risk group” described itself as “pop musique concrète” or “abstract pop”. Der Expander des Fortschritts relied ondisharmony and ruptures, which resulted in radio plays in a song format; the GDR as areal-socialist satire provided its material. Even the band’s name was a culturalappropriation of the superstructure by the substructure: “progress” was a fetishized word in the GDR…

€ 12.00

GDR Undergroundtapes 1980-1990

tapetopia is a series of releases based on cassettes from East Germany’s 80s underground, particularly from the East Berlin Mauerstadt music scene, featuring original layouts and track lists. For over 30 years after their initial “release” the music on these tapes was neither available on vinyl nor CD, but they were important statements in the canon of the GDR subculture. Despite the miniscule number of original cassettes in circulation…