andreas grosser: venite visum

Running Back welcomes Andreas Grosser for the start of the label's non-dancefloor series Running Back Incantations. Think Tornado Wallace's Lonely Planet or Suzanne Kraft's Missum who both would have been good and early contenders for a series like this, and you are half way there. Andres Grosser though, was "there" and that way before. Probably best-known for his 1987 collaboration Babel with Klaus Schulze (1987), Grosser is a bit of a dark horse in the universe whose big bang was krautrock and that went on to be called cosmic, space music or simply new age. A native East-Berliner, Grosser crossed the Wall in 1981 and next to studying piano, his day job was to advise, sell, maintain, and invent electronic music instruments. Naturally, Grosser had a good connection to and support from local Berlin musicians and groups, while working at night in his own studio and in those of others. Fast forward 37 years and Andreas is now one the world's leading microphone technicians specializing in German and Austrian vintage types. Venite Visum is an anthology of recordings made between 1976 and 1980. Released in 1981 on UK's York House Recordings as a cassette-only release, it features some of the most out-there, hypnotic, and still state-of-the art space music known to man. For the first time transferred onto vinyl and compact disc, it was perhaps best described by one reviewer at the time as; "powerfully relentless, repetitive themes which are constantly embellished and subjected to variations in tone colour and instrumentations. The music surges, coming in waves that approach and recede, but with each surge the waves seem to be higher up the shore." Now carefully transferred from an archived tape, remastered, and compiled here, it features the previously unreleased and no less mesmerizing "The Quantum Jump". Come and visit the hidden and almost forgotten.