- The techno artist Tobias Freund digs into his '80s archives for a fun, wide-ranging compilation.
- Throughout the '80s and '90s, Tobias Freund was immersed in the DIY culture of the Frankfurt underground. It was the scene that gave rise to Hypnobeat, founded by James Dean Brown and Pietro Insipido, to which Freund was an occasional contributor along with other groups such as Vo Ese. It was a vibrant time for independent German electronics—take Burnt Friedman's early forays (Some More Crime), Uwe Schmidt's pre-Atom Heart work as Lassigue Bendthaus and Thomas Franzmann (AKA Zip) and Markus Nikolai's group, Bigod 20. Building on the foundations of industrial, EBM, synth pop and other pre-techno genres, this milieu was a springboard for many of German dance music's elder statesmen.
Nowadays Freund is known for his house and techno works as tobias. and his regular collaborations with Max Loderbauer, but through the '90s he recorded primarily as Pink Elln, and in Sieg Über Die Sonne with Dandy Jack. The first proper Pink Elln release, co-produced with Atom Heart, appeared in 1993 on the seminal Frankfurt label Ongaku Musik, but the recordings under this guise reach much further back. Freund has put together a collection, called The Beginning, with tracks made between 1984 and '88. The simple title masks the compilation's humour and invention. Distorted tape skits are scattered throughout, and the tracks hop around various styles with abandon.
Freund's studio proficiency is well established—he's a regular go-to in Berlin for mastering and mixing services at his impressive Tempelhof studio—but his skills were well developed even in these early, rudimentary days. The nimble 3/4 drum programming on "I And You" balances a range of percussive and textural tones with synthetic chimes that could quite easily belong to Don't DJ or another rhythmically adventurous producer. Even though some of the synth tones sound typical of the '80s, the intricacy of "Clean" was ahead of its time.
It may be that post-production has buffed some of these artifacts. (His day job for more than 20 years was in a leading Frankfurt studio.) Some tracks, though, are too dishevelled to make such treatments possible. "Don't Put Your Pants Ov" is a wonderful freaked-out electro jam with a distinct Detroit edge (possibly without the Motor City being an influence at the time), but between Freund's fuzzed-out vocals and the grubby mixdown the track sounds right at home on cassette.
"Mörder" is one of The Beginning's most striking tracks. It's a minimal piece with just a simple synth mantra, looming pads and processed vocal layers. A pitch-shifted voice repeats the track title (you might mishear it as "murder"). It's a strange piece, but it gets under your skin far more than most other lo-fi experiments might. Freund's bountiful imagination and sense of humour on The Beginning manifest in all kinds of strange and wonderful ways, setting the stage for all that was to come.
Tracklist01. Darling
02. Don't Put Your Pants Ov
03. Running
04. After Love
05. The Losing Girl
06. Ceest
07. I And You
08. The Space Is Open
09. Claudia The Wonga
10. Clean
11. Punk Splat
12. Mörder
13. Be Near Me
14. Pre-Human Perc
15. Madness
16. Human Perc
17. Darling Reprise