(KrautRock) Nekropolis - Musik Aus Dem Schattenreich (1981), Germany - 1981, FLAC (image+.cue)

Peter Frohmader (born and raised in Munich) is the son of a well-known doctor, and seems to have had a rather privileged upbringing. He's not only a talented multi-instrumentalist, but also a graphic designer and prolific artist. This association with the art world has meant a multi-faceted career, one which has him working in diverse fields, with exhibitions, films, multi-media events, collaborations with H.R. Giger, Chris Karrer, and others.

One of the most innovative of musicians to emerge in the 1980's, Peter Frohmader's origins in music go back to the early-1970's. He was in many bands during the Krautrock era, which included Alpha Centauri (1971, reputedly a radical avant-garde band), Electronic Delusion (1973, Tangerine Dream inspired electronic experimental), Kanaan (1975, jazz-rock electronic), and he also got involved with the new-wave. But Peter was a Krautrocker, so in 1979 Peter started two new projects: the hard-rock band CIA, and the experimental solo/group project Nekropolis, to do his music.

His LP debut MUSIK AUS DEM SCHATTENREICH ("Music From The Darklands" in English), was quite extraordinary, aptly as dark and abstract as the sinister cover: a mysterious blend of electronics, guitars and percussives with rock aesthetics, a weird concoction recalling early Cluster and esoteric Amon Duul II. NEKROPOLIS 2 revealed a fascination with the music of Magma, especially the development of Jannick Top inspired bass guitar work, and in fact whole orchestras of bass guitars are used!

Nekropolis often gigged as a proper band, in fact we learned recently that Nekropolis existed live as various incarnations since the 1970's, but it wasn't until the 1980's that they were documented on record, as on NEKROPOLIS LIVE, with a music mixing elements of Magma, King Crimson and acid Krautrock, close to Spacebox. This band toured and also played at a couple of RIO festivals.

Despite a diversion into Material-like electro-funk on the mini-LP "The Forgotten Enemy" most subsequent work has been almost purely electronic. Though still, Peter has surprised on occasions with the electronic rock of RITUAL, and other adventurous works, like "Wintermusic" and his grandiose "bass symphonies" that are devastating to behold. These evolved out of the bass works on NEKROPOLIS 2 and amount to Peter creating orchestra's of bass guitars all on his own!

Peter's synthesizer-based music starts with the esoteric and hypnotic (very limited pressing) 10" "2 Compositions", which set the trend for a new type of music, a music further developed as abstract and visionary forms, on the cassettes ORAKEL / TIEFE and JULES VERNE CYCLE (close to Conrad Schnitzler in style). The later cassette SPHERES was, in contrast, an exercise in meditational new-age music.

Contrasting with those pioneering works, on his LP releases, he ventured onto complex synthetically orchestrated extravaganzas, featuring elaborately arranged classical and rock elements, starting with CULTES DES GOULES and continuing with the gothic symphonies of the HOMUNCULUS albums. This trend, with some exceptions is what Peter has pursued on his CD albums. The only problem is, that being so prolific, much of his late-1980's and 1990's work, as a result, feels very samey. Be this so, of his CD's, well worth commending are the two 3RD MILLENNIUM'S CHOICE archive collections, which contain some of Peter's most nerve-tingling music, and also the remarkable ADVANCED ALCHEMY OF MUSIC which recaptures the spirit of early-1980's Nekropolis, though a good deal more cosmic, and adding many other surprises, in a music that's dark, sinister and radical.

Apart from continuing solo, Peter has also had other projects since the demise of the Nekropolis live band. In 1985 he played together with avant-garde drummer Andrea Centazzo, in 1986 he played numerous concerts with Andreas Merz (from Weltklang) and also with Iva Bittova and Chris Karrer. In 1992 he established the free-rock psychedelic band Peter Strom, with the line-up of: Peter Frohmader (guitar, bass), Uwe Ruediger (drums) and Tobias Siegert (guitar, bass), though as yet only a demo tape exists.

In parallel to that he has continued to release albums of increasingly bombastic, dark, classical, synth-based music, as well as recording albums in collaboration with: Richard Pinhas (French guitar/synth legend, leader of Heldon) and Artemiy Artemiev (Russian synthesist, son of electronics pioneer Edward Artemiev). His more recent ones, like the totally over the top 2001 and ANUBIS DANCE with its techno touches (in a music that sounds like a step on from RITUAL) are all more of an acquired taste, in that they are a lot more cliched and obviously programmed/digital, with some amusing samples and outrageously off-key orchestrations!

What would you expect from a band called "Nekropolis"? With a very eloquent cover art describing the final ending and the disappearance of humanity throw creepy bones of dead bodies, you can imagine that the sound is everything dark, resonant, cavernous, haunting and ghostly. This infernal electronic manifest is a musical intrusion throw pain and agony, scary but so sublime in term of intensity and expression...the two first compositions are written for (very gloomy) double bass lines, menacing electronic effects and drum attacks. This marvellous, creepy and moody album by Peter Frohmader is one of the strangest things I've heard in popular music. Surely his most experimental if we remember the much more conventional "ambient" efforts of his last productions. "Unendliche Qual" is a hyper cavernous track, always with massive doom bass lines, agonised "almost heaven choir" ambient sounds and hammering drum parts. A proof that we can make a pretty dark and ass kicking album only with tremendous atmospheres. My favourite tracks on this one are the almost jazzy macabre "Mitternachtsmesse II" and the floating, repetitive and spacey like "Mitternachtsmesse I". A supreme and unique contribution, featuring discreet weird kraut experimentations.

Starting off with the same idea another reviewer of this album used to express the strangest and most influential feelings this music has installed for any one bestowing to listen to it, I'll say that, indeed, a cover so horrific and unpleasant plus an entire concrete set of cryptic and sharp names for each composition (though certainly, in both cases, this is not the most creepy "view" in musical concept ever), in such a linguine and freely expressed way, lead to the music of this classic debut by Peter Frohmader to be of that particular novelty nuance, one impregnated very deep, sardonic and dementia, alluding much of the heartless and "dunkelheit" operatic music impressions. The best such artists usually express it as a meaning of life (and of death), plus an expression of authentic blossom and powerful industry. It is a habit of eloquent diversity and stunning receptiveness, true, if you comprise well the flawless orientation of a music that burns and shrivels you inside, nonconformist and nondeterministic.

As powerful, indecisive and macabre as this experiment will sound, it also reflects, however, not a flagellation of music and emotions, but a deep trance of systematic experimentalism and over-mechanized techniques, having in mind a blow of proportions, by which music to stun, some kind of visual transmissions (like lugubrous sounds leading to cryptic images, or so) to be achieved, plus a good rhythm of artistic provocation to be fulfilled, since the entire composition leaves little time for sensibility. In conclusion, you could do an entire monologue and fearful description towards Music Aus Dem Schattenreich, calling it the music of totems, the emblem of devilish concepts and the radical substance of inconsequential dark and formidable punching character - but the album is also a very good and connecting study of electronic devices and sound-fractions, space-fears and reverted environmentalism, under envious qualities of rock, electronic tension, sound and ambient, noise and acid culture, dark and deep breaks of flairs - a very impressive study as well.

Peter Frohmader cuts off from his projects of cold counter-fashion composition, cubism rock, unshapely jazz or rock vibrations (though the 70s full work could be a collector's avid pleasure as much as collecting the sessions of Nekropolis and collaborating compositions, within the official register, turns out to be) and comprises a sum of art, weird ethic and stabilized avant-torrential influences within mechanics and comforts of electronic, synthetic and psych-epileptic improvisations. The strength of the Nekropolis projects is equal to the strength of collaborations with big artists like Pinhas or Artemiev and to the strength of Frohmader playing solo. So is the balance between him being an electronist, a sound-machinist, an avant-garde sketcher or a personality of diffuse rock. Such a debut like Music Aus Dem Schattenreich becomes suggestive to a lot of Frohmader's visions and introverted terrific dreams of music, sharing only a unique strong message of its own, mostly condensed between music and the liable impression.

With a low-extended instrumentality, but a perfect eclectic precision, Frohmader makes out of this album a heart beating (expected to have said flesh-ripping?) caliber and a paradox of minimal music sounding so massive. The Nekropolis project, associated a lot with this kind of impact art, seeks out the same kind of illusion, under different, more powerful or more forgotten essential musical gestures. Outside the atmosphere of Nekropolis and of Frohmader's sting art, you can't find a conclusive association with the grandest and most known contemporary styles of electronic. It is even a thought of beatitude that, in the beginning of the 80s, when pressure made a lot of electronic art collapse or become the expression of harmony, Peter Frohmader comes, heartless as it is, with a music of fear, complex language and powerful exploration. In a weaker eulogy, these early experiments, this one included, fully reflect a personal and conceptual force of expression and clatter, within a chosen dark, deep, frantic and exhausting modality.

Music Aus Dem Schattenreich is an hour long impressive album, with lots of suggestive strange and hollow sound-movements. Going just one more time back to the cover and the concept of "hecatomb music", the music might be a suggestion for some visual art or some cuts of music, though nothing is specific - many Nekropolis experiments, including Nekropolis 2, are actually "soundtrack" compositions. Inside its shell, the album becomes an electronic furnace of instrumentality and arranged technique, with a spiritual aggression that mostly chills you down hard enough as to experience this powerful and incisive music. Frohmader, through 12 pieces, tries combinations of noises and sounds (no mechanical particular achievement), new ambiances and sorrow/minor harmonies, a background or a frontal experiment of electronic tonalities, plus some spacey, rhythm-rocked, shock-sequential or synth-minimalistic pasts of effective and well-sustained calibers. The general (and critical) style is, therefore, cold electronic music, spontaneous rock or avant-garde, wall-sound environmentalism and cosmic-fracture.

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 3 from 28. July 2007

EAC extraction logfile from 28. September 2008, 21:10

Nekropolis / Musik Aus Dem Schattenreich

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12 | 56:42.44 | 2:06.52 | 255194 | 264695

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