Material

VINYL FORMAT. On their second album Material, originally released on Sky Records in 1981, Moebius & Plank ventured far, far away from the double coordinates of the Harmonia world and pop music cosmos. Amazingly, they did not find themselves floating in space, but made an exemplary landing, avoiding getting caught between a rock and a hard place. Material saw them generate a form of genre-busting electronic music, more radical than anything one might have expected to come out of Germany, not even from the likes of Cluster or Harmonia. Having said that, one should add that the album is in no way a copy of the new wave and industrial scenes that were enjoying such prominence at the time. Material is, in the best sense of the word, without style, that is to say, it cannot be aligned with any of the conventional styles available. On their two first albums, Moebius & Plank take up their place in a lengthy list of musicians and composers who, from roughly the end of the 1970s, gave up caring about which stylistic category their music might belong to, no longer looking upon experimentation as a strategy of reckless abandon, but as a perfectly normal course of action. 180 gram vinyl LP housed in a printed inner sleeve with full-color photos and notes by Asmus Tietchens.