konrad kraft: arctica

Tal present the first reissue of Konrad Kraft's Arctica, originally released on cassette on SDV Tonträger in 1987 in a handmade edition of about 50 copies. Pioneering production from the Düsseldorf mid '80s electronic underground world. Transferred for the first ever time from the original cassette to vinyl and CD. Konrad Kraft (Detlef Funder) is one of the still overlooked producers of Düsseldorf's fertile electronic music scene. Reduced to its essential musical elements, Arctica certainly contains some of the most uncategorizable and bewildering pieces of mid-eighties electronic music. Set between the areas of post punk and early techno, the album undulates between analog as well as digital instrumentation. After Konrad Kraft's appearance on the enthusiastically received compilation Sammlung: Elektronische Kassettenmusik, Dusseldorf 1982-1989. Cassettes were the medium of choice for self-produced recordings at the time. At the time of the Arctica sessions, the newly set up SDV studio consisted of a Tascam 38, an eight-track tape recorder, and only a handful of synthesizers such as a Roland JX3P and a Korg Monopoly. The style of Konrad Kraft's productions displayed (ever since and up until today), a strong adherence to an idea of continual self-creation and a quality of wanting to be responsible for one's own identity. Even three decades after its recording, Arctica still evokes images of an expedition into an edgy cold place which has strange wonders, polar lights, structures of ice and innumerable worlds and creatures in store. Konrad Kraft (who today runs Paraschall mastering studios): "In the early '70s I got a transistor radio as a gift and immediately fell in love with the shortwaves. So many different sounds that was truly fascinating. I can imagine that nowadays as music is endlessly compressed to fit into mobile phones and as music on the radio sounds dreadfully the same, there might be a renewed interest by a young generation in discovering electronic sounds. I can listen to Arctica much better now than when it originally came out, because there is a distance which allows me to approach the recordings on a more neutral plane . . . Arctica seems to sound even more contemporary today than it did in 1987." ltd 400/includes download.