one of many connections between the german kraut explosion in the early seventies and the german punk explosionexplosion in the late seventies of the last century. the release music orchestra (rmo) was one of oh-so-many german bands overestimating themselves as a new version of soft machine and coming out and along with some mediokay jazzrock with some deviant ideas. garuda was their second album, released on brain records in 1975, and received a warm welcome by the overintellectualized journalists of the german sounds magazine; especially helmut salzinger, the author of rock power and swinging benjamin, loved and promoted them with all of his heart.
rmo in 1975 were holger dunkel on bass, norbert jacobsen on reeds, zabba lindner on drums, manne rürup on keyboards and margit maya haberland on violin, percussion and vocals, with a little help from alto pappert (kraan etc) and jochen petersen (randy pie etc); konrad conny plank was the engineer and producer. margit lateron was one of the founding members of the bremen punk band blender and is of course wellwellwell known as a member of the hamburg punk band abwärts. i once saw them in 1978 supporting the cure in the stuttgart posh discotheque oz and stole a kiss from her backstage; really i did, yesyes, i did.
most compositions on the album are written by rürup/jacobsen/lindner, but every on of the five members has a short interlude showcasing just him or her. that is rather interesting, of course. the rest of the record sounds exactly as you will be expecting, but i like it, like it, lie kid...
this is what you want:
01 - slapstick
02 - zwischenspiel holger
03 - torso im sommerwind
04 - zwischenspielnorbert
05 - rallye dallye
06 - zwischenspielzabba
07 - zwischenspielmanne
08 - garuda
10 - mama kubu
(mp3 / all scans included / direct download)
1 comment:
It was the Conny Plank connection that made me seek out this album a while back (in my ongoing and probably futile effort to hear everything that came out of his studio) and very good it is too - didn't know about the Magita Haberland/ Abwärts connection (another data point to add to the complex German spider-web of connections that has kosmische on one end of the spectrum and NDW on the other).
As a young English teenager in the early 80s I got pretty obsessed with the Zickzack, X Records and the Ata Tak labels - just wished I had not sold all my vinyl as the early releases from these labels like the first two or three Abwärts singles were German post-punk at its finest.
For anyone interested in the other albums by RMO, the nice man over at Surfing The Odyssey blog has posted some decent rips:
http://surfingtheodyssey.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Release%20Music%20Orchestra
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