Sun Electric producing some fine German electronica with a discernible Kosmische tinge on Live At Votivkirche Wien (ARJUNAMUSIC AMEL-CD729).
This Berlin duo are quite new to me, but they evidently produced a lot of strong and inventive music since their inception in 1990 with a number of albums and singles under their perspex belts before the German label Shitkapatult compiled a fine survey of their achievements for the years 1998-2000, under the title Lost & Found. On these 1996 live recordings, there’s plenty of melodic synth herald angels harking, layers of tasty sparkle and red dust, loops and sequencers typing out their mechanical heartbeats like triphammers signalling across the telegraphic cosmos, and even some brief moments of shortwave radio samples adding a blast of caffeine to your somnolent afternoon pitch. Only the drum machines occasionally wander into overdrive territory, in a way that reminds us that Sun Electric may have begun their musical careers as average players in the “Frankfurt Trance” milieu (which may mean something to some readers) before evolving their own identity within that large and tract-fuelled genre which is loosely labelled “electronica”.
While I myself keep harking back to faint traces of Kraftwerk, Cluster, and almost anything released on the Sky Records label in the 1980s, this may be purely coincidental and it doesn’t mean that Sun Electric bear the same allegiance, or penchant for pastiche, to that area of music as Spacemen 3 to extreme psychedelic music of the 1960s. The real achievement of Max Loderbauer and Tom Thiel has been to inject real humanity into their melodies, tones, and textures, strongly suggesting they have emerged victors in that ongoing struggle that pitches man against machine in the war-strewn arena of synthesiser music. Not a one of these user-friendly instrumentals outstays their welcome, despite their generous durations – 10 to 12 mins seems to be the average bout before these boys decide they can terminate the session. The other aspect to this “Electric Listening Music Concert” is that the players apparently exploited the natural echo of the Gothic church in Vienna where it was recorded, using the 20-second delay in their favour.
I also like the idea that they think of themselves as the “Sun Electric Global Energy Corp.”; it would be nice if they were indeed heading up some benign source of renewable energy that didn’t produce obscene profits for its executives, nor exhaust the planet’s renewable resources, but I guess we’re in the realms of science fiction now. From 2nd January 2024.