Günter Schickert & Udo Erdenreich - Schickreich

Marmo Music unleashes two live recordings made 20 years apart in Berlin by krautrock first wavers, Günter Schickert & Udo Erdenreich, the first from 1988 and the two tracks on the B from 2008. The dates appear to hold some significance. Performed one year before the wall came down, the '88 recording of 'Die Zukunft ist der Kindern und den Narren' is febrile and pressured so as to reflect the political instability of the time, while there's a notable industrial influence at play that suggests someone was paying attention to what Neubaten and the Zickzack community of artists had recently been up to. Environmental sound litters the background of the recording - voices, coughing, the traffic of the outside world - in such a way that adds gravitas to the performance, putting you right there in the space, zoning out in the breathless tension. Two decades removed, the tracks on the flip find the pair in a slightly different headspace, this time out channeling that grand tradition of European drone music in a post-kraut context, something like Gottsching and Rother turning out for Korm Plastics, all choppy guitars bubbling away under a fourth world haze. You'd imagine the Berlin of the first recording a very different place to that of the second, and the impact of its psychogeography is clear here, though you can also find evidence of two restless artists working in symbiosis, drawing from the world around them and finding new boundaries to their sound. A great meeting of time, space and minds twice over.