Wolfgang Riechmann: Wunderbar

Originally released in 1978 on the influential Hamburg-based imprint Sky Records, home of those amazing collaborative LPs between Cluster & Brian Eno, Wunderbar is in every way one of the great lost treasures of Germany’s robust electronic/krautrock boom. Wolfgang Riechmann, who once played with the likes of Michael Rother of Neu! and Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür in his old outfit Spirits of Sound Group, had managed to find a way to bridge the gap between the ground his old bandmates had been breaking throughout the ’70s as scholars of the Dusseldorf School and the more esoteric overtures of their Berlin-based contemporaries Tangerine Dream. In doing so, Riechmann managed to create and put a wholly unique spin on German electronic music that is signified with this outstanding and challenging debut album. Unfortunately, Wunderbar would also mark Riechmann’s first and last solo album, sadly enough, as he fell victim to a knife attack less than a month before the album’s release, tragically snuffing out one of Germany’s brightest stars whose influence has only just begun to be heard in the 21st century.