[CP 248 CD] Mentocome

Privately issued on the band's own Giraffe imprint at some point in the early 80s, this, the lone outing by the duo of Axel Grube (later of Mutterfunk) & Rainer Rabowski (proprietor of the fantastic Klar! 80 tape series, and alongside Charly Morrow & Grube, the core of Roter Stern/Star/Belgrad) under their Mentocome alias is a beguiling assortment of exceedingly minimal figures for synth & metallic pinging echo that is about as far away from the (later) Zickzack scene as you can possibly imagine.

Presaging much of the coming wave of digital sound design by a good decade plus, the tracks herein dovetail between perceivable low-end rhythms and tiny fragments of clipped sound designs that are eerily prescient of the more conceptual aspects of Mille Plateaux and Raster/Noton etc. In fact, I can only really think of the Nuno Canvarro "Plux Quba" LP as something being in anywhere near the same orbit as this, and even that's a stretch! 

This Creel Pone replica edition recreates the album's original aesthetics; all faint drum-scan reductions of tributaries and brachium along with the outsize insert displaying the duo's post-Wilhelm Reich ethos/manifesto.