Review Rock music

Various Artists

Klar! 80: Ein Kassetten-Label aus Düsseldorf 1980

Bureau B • 2023

Düsseldorf, the eighties, a dark place, even sinister, at least more sinister than elsewhere, and filmed by two Japanese who travel there especially and want to know something about cassettes and Klar! and 80. Well, first of all light a cigarette, yes, no, the East and all that. The short film that Bureau B includes with its latest excavation is something for the conspiracy buffs who like to snoop through old files, a kind of window to the past that you can open and look out into the murky shadows of Dusseldorf. Between 1980 and 1982, Rainer Rabowski not only organised a number of music projects there with big names like Red Star Belgrade and Pilots, but also: Klar! 80, a tape label that was actually a cassette label, because back then apparently everyone said cassettes and not tapes, so, yeah, that’s just the way it was. In any case, people like Christo Haas and Beate Bertel were released on it, and shortly afterwards they became very successful with Liaison Dangereuses. And also the band Blässe, in which a certain Alexander Hacke immediately emerged as a founding member of Einstürzende Neubauten. And that’s what they sound like. And because everyone was somehow connected to everyone else, it all sounds similar and yet not at all, but everyone knew each other and to do that they actually had to meet, so maybe that was what everyone calls the scene today. So it really couldn’t have been that sinister after all. 

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