Programm 4 by Din A Testbild
Boomkat Product Review
First ever release - on any format! - of Din A Testbild’s rejected and long lost, but totally amazing, 4th album from 1983, engineered by Manuel Göttsching and sounding like a Drexciyan prototype....!!!
Mannequin Records have gone above and beyond to pluck out Din A Testbild’s previously unreleased and never-before-heard Programm 4, written and composed by Mark Eins in West Berlin near the Wall in 1983, all engineered by Manuel Göttsching and with tapes newly “imported and processed” by the group’s one time member Frieder Butzman. If that sentence doesn’t whet your whistle we simply can’t help you!
Slotting a once mythical piece of the NDW puzzle into place, the frenetic and blinding Programm 4 was initially deemed too “synth/punk/techno” by Klaus Schulze’s Innovative Communication and bafflingly remained on ice until Alessandro Adriani convinced Mark Eins to relinquish what turns out to be the fastest, maddest number in the DAT catalogue, over 30 years later.
The four A-side tracks are just astonishing, working with the same set-up as previous records, but turning in what sounds like a set of Detroit electro prototypes between the hard-stepping funk of West Berlin/Tegel Airport and the chaotic chromatic propulsion system of Cold War, whilst Frontstadt veers off of a wild tangent of tangled arpeggios and and orgiastic noise animations that’s just left us gawping, saving what sounds like a long-lost Drexciya missile with West/Berlin Underground just to show off. Oh yeh, and not to mention an 18 minute B-side track that sounds like Krautrock drained of all colour and fed to a pit of rabid, snarling drum machines and phet-riddled punk gremlins in Ost/Berlin.
Fuuuuckkk, this is sooooo gooooood!
Tracklist
| 1. | West-Berlin Tegel Airport | 4:15 |
| 2. | Cold War | 4:35 |
| 3. | Frontstadt | 5:39 |
| 4. | West-Berlin Underground | 3:12 |
| 5. | Ost-Berlin | 17:55 |
Credits
All Music composed, played & produced by Mark Eins
License
All rights reserved.
Die 1978 von Mark Eins gegründeten DIN A Testbild gelten als eine der treibenden Kräfte der West-Berliner expressiven Musik-Avantgarde und späteren Technowelle. Neben Mark Eins trugen unter anderem auch Gudrun Gut, Frieder Butzmann, Manuel Göttsching (Aschra) und sogar Klaus Schulze (Tangerine Dream) musikalisch zu DIN A Testbild bei. Tom Paschke ist seit 2018 im Team des Projektes Din A Testbild.