Long before Volker Kahrs and Tom Redecker began to work together as a duo in the early nineties, they were active in various scenes in the German music underground, but occasionally also appeared on the surface. Kahrs, for example, fingered the keys for the German Kraut ensemble Grobschnitt during the seventies and made his mark on their best albums with unconventional eclecticism and brilliant modulation. In 1982 he left the project, which meanwhile had become popular all over the country, just in time before it ruined itself by bowing to the mainstream. In retrospect, more of a stroke of luck. How else could Kahrs have subsequently found his way to world music, to the New Age meditations that he then began to publish under the name Yomano. And whether he would otherwise have encountered Redecker, who in the interim has reimagined psychedelic rock as one half of the duo The Perc Meets The Hodden Gentleman? Or would have launched Taras Bulba? Chances are: no. What we would have missed out on. A kind of drunken tribal trance, perhaps neoclassical industrial with dungeon synth or Casio dub, down-tempered to lab temperature? Anyone who tries to verbalise the duo’s sound palette inevitably turns into a dork. Similar to the Australian duo Soma, Taras Bulba have developed a signature sound for two albums that is, for once, truly their own – as mystical as it is cheesy, as retro as Futur II. Material from back then, but also unreleased tracks from the early 2000s have now been released on STROOM~ on the compilation »Venier Le Temps«. True floating music if you never want to open the tank again. Those who do manage to emerge after several hours of foamy immersion are faced with the only question: Why couldn’t it go on like that?
Venier Le Temps
