Mœbius - Blue Moon (Original Motion-Picture Sound-Track)

The only film score Dieter Moebius ever wrote, and one of the most quietly distinctive records in his entire catalog. Originally released on Sky Records in 1986 as the soundtrack to Karsten Wichniarz's little-known West German crime thriller of the same name, Blue Moon arrived at a particular moment in the history of electronic music: a time when synthesizers and drum machines were no longer exotic, when the Krautrock pioneers had either scattered or were making uneasy bids for relevance, and when Moebius, the constant simplifier of the Cluster and Harmonia family, chose to make a particular virtue of simplicity itself.

The film has largely vanished from the cultural record, but the music it generated has endured as a genuinely unique document. The eleven tracks were composed to fit the timing of specific scenes, giving them a concision and focus that sets them apart from Moebius' other solo work, meticulously crafted electronic miniatures of exceptional aural transparency that condense his already minimal style into something even more precise and purposeful. The tense, blaring "Am See" and the brilliantly titled "Kriminelle Energie" carry the sustained dread appropriate to a thriller, while "Falsche Ruhe" and the spare plinky ambience of several other tracks could pass for lost outtakes from the Harmonia sessions. The distorted 303-alike peal of "Hoffnungsschimmer" and the rippling dub bass of "Im Wedding" push into territory that sounds more like late-night Berlin than any conventional film scoring tradition. Moebius had a voice found nowhere else on screen at the time, and this album demonstrates why.

Reissued by Bureau B and mastered from the original tapes with liner notes by Asmus Tietchens, pressed on 180-gram vinyl.