Sprung Aus Den Wolken - 1981 – West-Berlin (2024)

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Sprung Aus Den Wolken - 1981 – West-Berlin (2024)

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Long overdue reissue of Berlin-based experimental new wave/post-punk outfit Sprung Aus Den Wolken's vital self-titled debut, remastering it from the original tapes and bundling it with extra material from the same period. RIYL Malaria!, Einstürzende Neubauten, Suicide or Tuxedomoon.

Before techno tightened its grip on the German capital, Berlin was home to the "Geniale Dilletanten" movement, an art school adjacent subculture that emerged at the tail end of the New German Wave. Avoiding virtuosity (hence the name, that means "brilliant amateurs" in English), adopting new technologies and writing songs in German rather than English, this DIY-minded scene took its name from a 1981 performance at Berlin's Tempodrom, where free-thinkers like Einstürzende Neubauten, Christiane F., Gudrun Gut, Die Tödliche Doris and Sprung Aus Den Wolken helped usher in a new age of boundless experimentation.

Sprung Aus Den Wolken was the brainchild of German musician and visual artist Kiddy Citny, whose open-minded fusion of dub, experimental electronic music, punk rock and industrial sounds was rolled out over a series of low-key but cult releases for labels like ZickZack and Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L’Acier. Over the years, the group swelled to include contributions from Neubauten's Jochen Arbeit and Alexander Hacke (who writes the liner notes to this reissue), Thierry Noir and Piet Essens, and although they went on hiatus in 1991, Citny rebooted the project in the late '00s following a re-issue campaign, bringing Nouvelle Vague's Renault Schubert into the fold.

'1981 - West-Berlin' finds Sprung Aus Den Wolken at their most impulsive and most eccentric. The DIY qualities that anchored the "Geniale Dilletanten" scene as a whole are fully on show here, and Citny sounds almost possessed as he spits, hums and sneers across noisy dub-inspired basslines, rudimentary bleeps and blown-out guitar fragments. And although there's no academic fluency, Citny packs in more ideas into his tracks than many of his musically educated peers. The interplay between tinny beatbox taps and tape-fucked live drums on 'Dub & Die' is shockingly forward thinking, immediately shuttling the music into its own zone. There's an air of punk, but this isn't music that sounds as if it's trying to echo anything directly - metallic crunches seem to descend from thin air, while detuned guitar twangs twist into wobbly monosynth oscillations.

The post-punk influence is more noticeable on the warped, off-grid 'Komm her sing mit', a funk-fueled dreamzone stomper, but Sprung Aus Den Wolken routinely wander off the edge of the map. 'Soso', for example, is a dirt-damaged, Beefheart-level interpolation of R&B standard 'Fever', and the galvanizing 'Gegen den Strom' decorates a pounding proto-techno beat and acidic synth squelches with reverberating Jandek-like twangs and Citny's ominous whispered vocals. The lengthy 'Nichts im Sinn' even pre-empts the understated dubby experimental maneuvers of the Alien Transistor/Notwist crew. And the set's polished off with 'Lust-Last-Liebe' (that appeared on Vinyl-on-demand's 'Early Recordings' comp), 'Schür die Glut', two versions of 'Que Pas' and two versions of Sprung Aus Den Wolken's best known track 'Pas Attendre', that was featured on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' 'Wings of Desire'. Historic material - get acquainted.