Eigenwerke 1980-1983 [LP]

Michael Heinkel - Eigenwerke 1980-1983 [LP]

In the early eighties, Michael Heinkel was one of those quiet electronic musicians hardly anyone knew - at least outside of Munich. While machine rhythms were being perfected in Düsseldorf, dilettantism was elevated into an art form in Hamburg and West Berlin was soundtracking it's own feverish coldness, Munich seemed to be a place where, apparently, nothing was happening. Or almost nothing. Because beneath the radar, far removed from the grand narratives of those years, Michael Heinkel was already creating his own electronic cosmos - stripped-down, idiosyncratic and often ahead of it's time. Electronic minimalist music, born somewhere between a home studio, nightlife and the longing for a future that could only just be imagined back then. But the recordings disappeared into drawers, onto cassettes and tape reels. For decades, they remained a secret shared only among friends, insiders and a handful of close companions. It was only 45 years later that Andreas Dorau and Ralf Hertwig (Palais Schaumburg) - two defining figures of that early avant-garde - insisted that the recordings finally be made accessible. This early '80s New Wave, Electro, Proto-Electronica, Industrial and Kraut-Pop album has never been released before is now available Elaste Records. Not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as the overdue release of a missing piece in the history of German electronic music. This music is not a nostalgic retrospective. It is a delayed signal from a future that had already begun back then.