Today is now 16 years of Was Ist Das?

Last year for the 15th, it was a label focused anniversary, because I was short of time and totally blocked on the writing front.

This year, it’s nothing but writing! I originally planned to have 16 reviews ready to go today but it exceeded that! Now up on our Features page are reviews of:

Expo 70, Eric Arn, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Wreaths, Black Dice, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, Cubs, Mind Maintenance, Laibach, Crazy Doberman, Daniel Vujanic, Yoshi Wada, Phew, —__–___, Yann Tierson, Wolves In The Throne Room, Kevin martin and Birds of Maya!

Right, its late, I’m off to bed. I’ll put up a video review of Can tomorrow

July 27th at 8pm CET, the Was Ist Das? radio show returns to CAMP the internet radio station broadcasting out of the French alps! It’ll be up on their Mixcloud soon after broadcast too. After a long break (the last show was January 2019) we are resuming monthly shows, although this time the format will be much looser. This show is a special mix of my favorite 2021 releases and takes in ambient, psychedelic, metalgaze, techno, experimental electronics, dubstep and, of course, krautrock

October 8th sees the release from Hamburg label Bureau B of the sumptous Faust box set on CD and vinyl compiling virtually everything from those golden years of 71 to 74. It’s been remastered by regular collaborator Amaury Cambuzat from the original tapes.

So it includes their self titled debut, So Far, The Faust Tapes and Faust IV. That’s not all, though, the box set includes a further three LPS. The first is called “Punkt” and is compiled by the surving band members from their final studio sessions in Munich and is intended as the final 5th LP (Punkt means full stop in German). The two remaining albums, Momentaufnahme I and Momentaufnahme II are previously unreleased out-takes from the Wumme and Mansion recording sessions that were discovered during the transfer process.

Then there are two 7″ singles in the vinyl box set (compiled a separate CD in the CD set). There’s a reprint of the single “So Far/It’s A Bit Of a Pain”. The other single contains the song that got the band signed to Polydor, “Lieber Herr Deutschland” and the song suspected of getting them dropped “Baby”. Jean-Herve Peron of the band intends to personally stamp the sleeves of this last 7″ with ‘accepted’ on the front and ‘rejected’ on the back.

There’s also the obligatory booklet but instead of it being some expert whittering on, its going to be full of eye witness accounts, both positive and negative! You can pre-order the set now from Bureau B direct as well as the usual good retailers like Norman and Rough Trade

Thanks to Jean-Herve Peron and the Faust List for the extra details!