Mœbius & Plank - Rastakraut Pasta

The debut collaboration between two of the most significant figures in the German underground, and one of the most gloriously unpredictable records in the entire Krautrock lineage. Recorded in September 1979 at Conny's Studio outside Cologne and released on Sky Records in 1980, Rastakraut Pasta captures Cluster's Dieter Moebius and legendary producer Conny Plank in their most playful and adventurous mode, weaving Jamaican dub and reggae rhythms through the kosmische textures and electronic experimentation that defined their respective careers, with Can's Holger Czukay adding bass to three tracks and completing one of the era's most unlikely and most rewarding studio trios.

The title says everything about the record's spirit: a breakneck, elegant collision of diverse and seemingly incompatible elements. The mock electro-reggae of "News" opens with a hypnotic electronic groove that reeks of smoke and heated circuitry. The title track itself is basically a weirdo dub pattern scrawled with skronky Teutonic melodies and fizzing electronics from every corner of the studio. "Feedback 66," featuring Czukay, is one of the album's absolute peaks, surf-rock submerged in tar, its slowed-down rhythm redolent of Sly and the Family Stone filtered through a Cologne basement at 3am. Side two offers something more easygoing, from the dreamlike ambient space-jazz of "Solar Plexus" with its backwards voices and flanged electric piano, to the lilting seven-minute groove of "Two Oldtimers," which suggests a glimpse of what Kraftwerk might have sounded like without all their cybernetic ambitions.

As Steven and Alan Freeman wrote in The Crack In The Cosmic Egg, these early Moebius and Plank albums were revelations of innovation, bringing unlikely combinations of industrial rock, cosmic music, and dub together in a reborn spirit of Krautrock that played recklessly with offbeat forms. Julian Cope included the album in his Top 50 essential Krautrock records. This Bureau B reissue, housed in a printed inner sleeve with full-color photos and notes by Asmus Tietchens, is pressed on 180-gram vinyl and is the finest available edition of an album that still sounds fresh and genuinely strange over forty years on.