Bleep

It’s easy to forget how reductive a term like ‘krautrock’ really is; the stylistic and technological experiments of German musicians after the 1960s came to encompass as wide a swathe of success as any nation would hope for. Case in point: Harold Grosskopf’s Synthesist. Released in 1980, the Ashra drummer’s debut solo LP took the enduring looped ethos of Neu! And the so-called Berliner Schule and infused it with disco sophistication — as in ‘So weit, so gut’ — and ambient majesty — as in ‘1847 - Earth’ in order to create a compelling electronic masterpiece. The proof of its legacy lies in the second disc in this package, composed of new interpretations by the likes of Steve Baltes and Stefan Lewin.