- Catnip for Salon Des Amateurs devotees.
- "Could someone please do a rerelease of this masterpiece?!" begged a commenter on the Discogs page of Manos Tsangaris's 1984 EP Elephant's Easy Moonwalk Through The Night last summer. "Would be something for Magazine Rec., don't you think so, Manos? With an edit from Jens-Uwe Beyer and a remix from Barnt + the original!?"
It's a good idea—the track would sound right at home on Cologne's Magazine—but the commenter could just as well have suggested a reissue on, say, Themes For Great Cities from the neighbouring Düsseldorf, with a remix from Jan Schulte (AKA Wolf Müller), who is credited with rediscovering this weird gem, and who featured a bunch of similar sounding '80s oddities on his recent Tropical Drums Of Deutschland compilation. Or they could have suggested Nonplace, the label run by the former Cologne resident Burnt Friedman, who worked closely with late Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit and has ties to the Liebezeit-inspired Drums Off Chaos ensemble, of which Düsseldorfer Tsangaris is a member (along with, sometimes, Magazine's Jens Uwe-Beyer).
The third option came to pass. But the point is that the idiosyncratic art-techno sound of North Rhine-Westphalia—represented in its many facets by the likes of Barnt, Schulte and Nonplace—is thriving right now, and "Elephant's Easy Moonwalk Through The Night" slots into it from numerous angles. It's a groove track, basically, built from pungent layers of hand-played percussion and shambling along circa 115 BPM. Bass stabs give the track some synthetic bite. Throw in a dash of quirky humour (the title, which matches the track's ponderous gait) and you've got catnip for Salon Des Amateurs devotees.
A new B-side, "Elephants Cry Salty Tears," follows a similar recipe. Only this time the percussive layers are subtler, and a creaking door hinge works as punctuation. It doesn't quite have the vividness of the A-side, instead with a more delicate acoustic soundworld resembling the recent Drums Off Chaos tracks also issued on Nonplace. That's OK, though—lightning rarely strikes twice.
TracklistA Drüm 1 (Elephant's Easy Moonwalk Through The Night)
B Drüm 3 (Elephants Cry Salty Tears)