Double LP
BACK IN STOCK, having sold out immediately on release a month or so back is this first time vinyl collection of the four near-mythical tapes Beate Bartel and Chris Haas released as CHBB in the early 80s, alongside a number of previously unreleased productions. Those aware of those cassettes will know this to be very fine news indeed, for so long have these recordings been considered a kind of El Dorado of European minimal wave/post-punk electronics. CHBB would quickly evolve into Liaisons Dangereuses, a feted enough project in itself, but in 1981 they were at the bleeding edge right out the gate in nascent form, expanding their understanding of analog electronics and industrial music gained via their respective work with Malaria, Neubaten and DAF into what we might now label Electronic Body Music. Given the era, these 20 tracks ought really to sound primitive or quaint, but they really do not - this is physical music, for and of the body, imagining a dancefloor that did not yet really exist, and one that it still finds a legitimate place on now. This is the language of EBM, minimal wave, industrial techno, electro, electro-clash... music so visionary it creates its own context: the metal dance, if you like. Hard to overstate just how vital this music still sounds, ragged, assertive, yet also uniquely nuanced too, a mix of linear 'bangers', so to speak, and more investigative electronic experiments that do the crucial work of showing how electronic music can be just as broadly expressive as any other acoustic means of creation. In 1981, in Berlin of all places, this must have presented as truly radical, the sound of the new emergent city phoenixing out of the rubble of its previously collapsed buildings. Utterly essential.
