Intransitive Recordings

RLW

$12.99

Songs From Under the Floorboards is proud to present this gem from the archives of Ralf Wehowsky, aka RLW, founder of the Selektion label (a major inspiration for my starting Intransitive) and the legendary German band industrial/noise band P16.D4 (a major early and lasting influence on my own music).

Grauzeit features a previously unreleased session from October 1980 and two added studio improvisations that would appear in edited form on Wer Nicht Arbeiten Will Soll Auch Nicht Essen!, P16.D4′s debut cassette album. The band, which includes a young Achim Scepanski (later to found the Mille Plateaux and Force Inc techno labels) on synth, played a strange blend of gray noise, psychedelic improvisation, and industrial dub provocation that still sounds unhinged today. RLW and his colleagues (friends from school, and a temporarily-out-of-the-hospital mental patient who happened to be in the audience at an early concert) made a dada/jazz/punk racket in stark contrast to the fashionable new wave scenes in Berlin and Hamburg at the time. They would rapidly evolve into an art collective that would create installations, write and publish books, produce records and CDs, and instigate an international network of cassette-trading collaborators at a time when self-publishing on tape was itself a radical political act.

RLW “eaRLy W 5: Grauzeit” CDr by Intransitive Recordings

Praise for Grauzeit:

“Fucked-up space-jazz workout with sporadic barked Germanic vocals and swells of feedback countering the post-Krautrock vibes, skittering drums, and noir basslines. One can think of something sort of like the Plastic People Of The Universe or the oddball Factory band Crawling Chaos or maybe even a super-loose Captain Beefheart filtered through a Kraut-punk exploration and expressionism. It’s pretty hard to pin any of this down.” – Aquarius Records

“An essential release.” – Vital Weekly