Unauthored work: A memorable concert by the electronics pioneer in East Berlin, for the first time on LP and CD.
The heart of the work of Conrad Schnitzler, who died in 2011, was a gigantic sound archive, which he repeatedly used to create his albums and concerts in a kind of prototypical sampling. Schnitzler from West Berlin had already made contact with the avant-garde musician Jörg Thomasius from East Berlin at the end of the 1970s. Plans for a joint performance in East Berlin turned out to be difficult because it would have required the approval of the GDR authorities, but concerts could be camouflaged as private or church events.
Schnitzler produced four cassettes with his music, which the New York sound artist Gen Ken Montgomery used for a concert on September 3, 1986 in the Church of the Redeemer in the artist’s absence: beat-less sound constructions, colorful synthesizer sounds that contrast the black mood and Dark ambient tracks that explain why Schnitzler is not only held in high esteem by contemporary electronic musicians, but also in the black metal scene.
All of this came about at a time when colleagues from the so-called Berlin School, such as Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, had long since sacrificed their experimental ambitions on the altar of eighties sound aesthetics. Jörg Thomasius recorded the concert and released the recording in 1987 on his label “Kröten Katten” under the prosaic title CONCERT. Now it appears for the first time on LP and CD.