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Bureau B

V/A - Eins und Zwei und Drei und Vier: Deutsche Experimentelle Pop-Musik 1980-86

"Do not adjust your sets. Take a step back from the tracking. This is the sound of Germany's musical youth let loose on cheap synths and pawnshop guitars. A record of a disparate scene of squat pop-stars, art school upstarts and committed non-musicians who redefined German music in the first half of the 1980s. By the dawn of the new decade, punk had burnt out in a frenzy of feedback, reshaping the musical landscape before burrowing back into the underground for a period of reinvention. But the scorched earth it left behind proved to be fertile soil, nurturing a new movement grass-rooting through Germany's major cities. For the first time the country had its own youth culture, spilling out of the squats of Hamburg and West Berlin, occupying the art scene in Düsseldorf and Köln and congregating around independent record shops stocked with angsty import 7"s. Empowered by punk's DIY spirit, these kids valued conviction over competence, opting to ignore the industry and make music for themselves, sung in their own language. Even the cats we now call krautrock, revolutionary though they were, mostly sang in English, adopting the lingua franca of rock n' roll as a shorthand for authenticity for a native crowd who wouldn't have it any other way. This new scene rejected the expected, celebrating freedom of expression above all else. Armed with unconventional instruments, newly affordable electronics and rudimentary recording gear, they worked from the ground up, building basic rhythms and simple melodies into mutant grooves and following their imagination wherever it took them. The result was a genre fluid wave of fusion pop pulled from funk, punk, jazz and reggae; united in attitude rather than aesthetic. Lyrically, the groups explored the serious and silly, embracing the irreverence of dadaism to deliberately displease the earnest alternatives of the older generation. Features Der Plan, Die Partei, P!OFF?, Palais Schaumburg, Dunkelziffer, Populäre Mechanik, Andreas Dorau (Die Doraus & Die Marinas), Pyrolator, Träneninvasion, Deutsche Wertarbeit, Asmus Tietchens, Die Fische, Conrad Schnitzler, Carambolage, Xao Seffcheque, Foyer des Arts, Die Zimmermänner, Östro 430, Die Radierer, and Holger Hiller." - Bureau B .
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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
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