Arctica

It’s wild to think such an excellent album of home-brewed electronics could sit, hidden away, on a cassette in an edition of fifty copies, but that’s the story of Konrad Kraft’s Arctica. The nom de plume of Detlef Funder, Konrad Kraft has released a number of albums since this, his 1987 debut, but he rarely bettered Arctica. It’s all in the blend – he’s obviously informed by kosmische and Berlin School electronics, but the music’s taken on the roughness of post-punk DIY and industrial. Arctica shifts registers, from cold cuts that juxtapose bleak melody with thick, abrasive synth noise, to rhythmic miniatures, where tick-tocking patterns intersect, overlap and derail each other. Recently reissued by Stefan Schneider of To Rococo Rot and Mapstation, whose own music owes a good amount to such predecessors, it’s a muted masterpiece of European proto-electronica, up there with other titles like Monoton’s Monotonprodukt 07 and Asmus Tietchens’ Formen Letzter Hausmusik.