Recently Eurock began collaborating with two people involved with music in Germany doing very innovative work. Both are involved in academic studies at the prestigious University of Kassel in Germany, as well as involved in various aspects of music production as well.

Roman Beilharz is a Lecturer at the Institute of Music at the University of Kassel, the owner of the UVASONAR Media Pool, a musician, composer, engineer, educator, writer and filmmaker. Roman’s company provides multi-media support for new artistic talent to be recognized in their various fields today.

Ulrich Kutschera is a Professor of Biology at the University of Kassel in Germany there, as well as a visiting Scientist at Stanford, California. He is also a musician, his most recent album San Francisco Bay, is highly popular in Yoga Studios in the Palo Alto-area. Kutschera’s excellent 1983 album, First Incarnation, is soon to be released in a revised, re-mastered extended, version.

http://www.uvasonar.de/

Excerpt from Krautrock Transnational by Alexander Simmeth

Published 2016 by Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Germany

Alexander Simmeth is the Author of this encyclopedic work exploring all aspects of the genre of music originally called "Krautrock " by the UK Pop Music press. While a student at University in Germany he paid me a visit doing research for his book. After his visit he went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to visit their Archives. While he was there he talked to them about his book and my work doing Eurock for many years. As a result of that visit they asked me to donate my Eurock publications to their Museum Archives. In his book there is a passage in reference to Eurock. The book is written in German, so that passage about Eurock was kindly translated so you can read it below.

"Eurock began in March 1973, the fanzine Eurock was published, initiated by Radio-DJ and LP-importer Archie Patterson. The first issues were published, assembled by hand and distributed in small numbers. In the following years, Eurock magazine grew enormously and was read primarily by importers, music journalists and musicians alike. Until the end of 1975, Eurock exclusively focused on Krautrock.

In addition to reviews of LP’s and discographies, numerous reports and interviews were published, wherein the history of German music and background information of the pertinent Krautrock groups were described. Between 1971 and 1974, Patterson contributed significantly, as a Radio-DJ in central California, to the promotion of progressive German pop music. Incidentally, Patterson’s interest in Krautrock was sparked by reading the British Music Weeklies, which he received as a teenager from his grandfather.

Along with print-media, Radio shows were a key factor in the promotion of pop music during the 1970s in the USA - not TV. The Radio-system was commercialized, by the way, not organized as in Europe. State-sponsored institutions like in Germany and Great Britain were not established. … The promotion of German progressive music in the US was facilitated via different music personages, such as Archie Patterson importer, Radio-DJ and producer of a Fanzine, Ira Blacker a manager in the music industry, or the British music manager Richard Branson, who initiated Virgin Records that was interested in experimental music."

[Translation to English by Ulrich Kutschera]

 Distribution & the Cassette Culture

In the beginning 1971-1973, the music Eurock played on the radio and chronicled as a fanzine was in its embryonic phase. My mission was a journey of discovery and exploration, the goal was to turn people on to the amazing music I uncovered. In addition to offer insight into the people and the evolution of their creativity as well as effect it had on those who listened and the culture as a whole.

Today with Eurock I reflect back a lot, write, and share personal stories about what happened along the way. One of the more interesting stories involves Kraftwerk. They had financed their very first USA tour themselves partially by selling the rights for their first three albums and Autobahn to Phonogram for the ridiculous amount of $2,000.

In 1975, they were playing Live at the small Keystone Club in Berkeley, so I drove up and stayed with a friend to see them. The place was half-empty and we had our choice of seats so we sat mid-center. I placed my small portable Panasonic cassette player on the table, plugged in a small Mic and preceded to record 2 Ampex C-60 tapes of music.

Some years later, another friend who had access to state of art audio equipment in a studio digitized the music for me and dubbed each of us DBL CD copies. A bit later, I had the original photos scanned to make covers.

For its time the sound is excellent. The Kraftwerk Live @ the Keystone Club Berkeley taping done on 5/11/75 may have planted the seed for me and those original 2-tapes could be the rarest cassettes in the world perhaps? I guess I could say that’s when and where my adventures in the creation of cassette culture began.

My entry point into the music business was Intergalactic Trading Company in Portland, OR. ITC was as an adjunct to the record store Music Millennium. At the outset the focus was on UK imports via Caroline Records UK and sporadic importing of German rock via Juliana Hopp GMBH out of Germany.

They had heard about Eurock and in September 1976 owner Don MacLeod hired me to run their mail-order and we soon began importing music from everywhere else. Due to my Eurock contacts over the span of the next aprox. 3/4 years the floodgates were opened to France, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Spain, Japan, Australia, etc. We did limited local wholesale and a couple stores in the Northwest, but unlike Jem it was only me and one other person doing everything.

Interestingly the bonanza sell-off you mentioned may partly be related to Eurock as I knew one of the head import buyers at Jem East at the time, Phillip Page, who subscribed to the magazine. When I did the Kosmische Musik Issue #3 in early 1975 he contacted me about the Comic Couriers & OHR records, labels which had been the focus of that issue. The first two issues had featured Krautrock extensively.

Those led to Jem importing some of those titles as well as opened the door to many other German labels to some extent. They even reprinted the full-page promotional layout from Eurock Issue #3 and used it as part of their promotion for those albums and a tie in to the other German music titles they began to license and offer.

The first Distribution advert in Eurock Magazine was included in Issue #13 at the beginning of 1979. What had happened at ITC was Music Millennium began doing parallel importing, which later became the big thing in the music import music business that led to a more adventurous period in music importation & Jem's ultimate failure. 

In ITC's case they began bringing in import pressings from Japan of The Eagles, Steely Dan, etc. due to their superior pressings. As a result, my budget became limited for importing and selling fewer odd experimental music titles from Europe. The result was I began offering my own parallel small selection of things offered via Eurock Distribution.

That early Eurock Distribution direct sale adverts featured books from France, US LPs by Chrome, The Decayes and 1st Univers Zero album + EP's by Pascal Comelade and Spain's Macromassa In addition the first original Palace of Lights cassettes as well as initial cassette release by other US artists like Steve Roach, Don Slepian, Galen Herod, Anode, Don Slepian, Ken Moore, Zazen Zafaun and WOZ cassette plus a VHS tape called Matching Face & Nightie by a local Portland filmmaker friend who was promoting the Residents. From the outset ED was multi-format, eclectic and unique.

Recently the great Vinyl on Demand German reissue label released a fantastic triple box set titled American Cassette Culture documenting the US artists Eurock promoted in the early cassette culture scene.

Due to this ITC financial situation and budget constraints I continued doing the multi-layered approach until one day I got a phone call from LA in late 1979 from people who were starting a new import music company named Greenworld. I flew down there and part of their business plan was to have a direct retail arm of the company. They wanted me to come down and set it up. That was called Paradox Music Mailorder.

I continued having ED adverts in the magazine through Issues #17 selling only foreign EP's, books and magazines. After that point I simply reviewed all the Indie cassettes and other EPs adding my personal contact at the end so people could write to me and buy things from me directly outside of the Greenworld business structure. A prime example of this occurred in 1980 with the discovery of experimental music down in Mexico where there was a small but very active and creative group of musicians who discovered Eurock

Ironically, once again there was a rapid expansion of parallel importation of mainstream music from Japan. My work began to be affected due to the same dynamic of cash flow imbalance, it was deja vu for me. In 1981, I quit working for anyone else and began doing Eurock Distribution full time while living in LA. Its main focus was the exploding cassette music scene as well as well as the various many other releases on cassette, fanzines, Indie LPs, EPs, etc.

A bit earlier in late 1979, early 1980, I began my own Eurock cassette label. The first release was a tape smuggled out of Czechoslovakia via Canada recorded by the illegal band Plastic People of the Universe whose leader was then in jail. It was called the Hundred Points. That was the first release on the label released which was followed by a series of original recordings by various other international artists from France, USA, etc.

In 1984, I moved from LA back up to Portland, OR and Eurock expanded organically into many different areas. One involved cassettes. I lectured for classes, grades 7-12, for 5-years, in a Portland K-12 Public School. I offered a Listeners Guide to Experimental Music. I recorded special mix cassettes each week to use as musical background accompanying stories about my experiences in music overall. I ended up ultimately releasing them as a cassette series of taped music and lectures chronicling my personal adventures in the 1960's along with the creation Eurock.

At this point a few other small import specialists like Aeon began to spring up that may have been influenced by those two companies. That connection also perhaps goes back to the Mnemonists, an art/ music group out of Colorado.

During that time I was in touch with Bill Sharp and Torger Houghen helping promote and market their work and first releases. I think they had a cassette only release as well as an LP titled The Mnemonist Orchestra (later shortened). Ultimately they changed their name to Biota, if memory severs me right. I used a lot of the Mnemonist art as illustration and covers for Eurock Magazine. I just used a small impressionist piece for illustration in the new Eurock book, The Music of Gilbert Artman & Urban Sax.

While running ED I always dealt directly with artists directly as well as small Indie labels. I never did wholesale of the cassettes as the retail price/ cost were so low, or very high in the case of very special packaging. More importantly, cassettes at first were mostly all done in VERY LTD Editions. I'm sure it's hard to imagine a time now when everything wasn't ever present and mass marketed, available free as a download, or sold at ridiculously high prices.

Most LPs were sold for around $7:00 via ITC or Paradox, with most cassettes I sold being $6.00. As strange as it seems music back then was done for the love of creation by the artists. Eurock & ED were motivated by my desire to share it with people and form a personal link with other like-minded music lovers. In retrospect, I was blissfully naive. Today it's all about capitalizing on and cashing in on everything, be it music or any other form of art, or product being marketed. Not Art for Arts sake...

It's impossible in this day and age to do artistically what labels like DDAA, Bain Total, Ptose Productions (France), TRAX, ADN, MB (Italy), Marquee Moon, Vanity Records, YLEM, LLE (Japan), Mirage, YHR (UK), Via Lactea, Oxomaxoma, Voldarepet (Mexico) and Agjtasjon (Norway) did musically or conceptually. DIY was completely unique and unprecedented back then, produced as LTD ED cassette releases. 

Eurock certainly was one of the very few, if not only seller of most these labels outside of direct personal sales by artists and small labels in their own areas. Two examples of this single minded creative ethos and process stand out in my mind.

DD Records in Japan was perhaps the most incredible label of all. T. Kamada was the guy who did the label at the time. He was a Med School student (later becoming a genetic research genius). He released some 220+ tapes and would send me a sample copy of each tape, then duplicate copies for me in the amount I ordered. Each DDR tape came with a 5" x 7" Xerox libretto. I sold them for $6.00 as my cost was very low and he paid the postage... The diversity of musical style and passion embodied in DDR releases musically was astounding.

As for the Eurock label itself, aside from the extraordinary circumstances of the PPU debut release, the 6-cassette set by Cyrille Verdeaux (of Clearlight fame) Kundalini Opera production process is a paradigm example of the Indie process in action.

Those 6 individual tapes were all duped by Pat Baum, drummer for the legendary Portland all girl punk trio The Neo Boys. She lived in a big old run down building on Russell Street that was serving as a series of ramshackle lofts at that time (now gentrified of course). Pat had 6 or 8 cassette recorders lined up on a couple shelves so she could dupe all the tapes in real time. I had a friend print the multi-colored J-cards + color libretto then gave them to her for assembly and she'd tell me; pick the order up next week. It was totally cool and she got to know my #1 son as I brought him along to her place sometimes to drop off or pick up the order. You can't make this stuff up...

Those were the days of wine and roses for musicians and also in terms of being a wildly adventurous entrepreneur. One of the great things about DIY cassettes was that it liberated artist's creativity from the shackles of professional distribution companies and minimum order restrictions. They could be experimental, imaginative using simple equipment and tape recorders within the confines of their bedrooms or garages and sometimes the results were truly amazing.

That window of time was open for a while then closed as technology always continues its inexorable progression. The whole process of making music, influencing culture, the part cassettes played in its evolution and technological development is outlined very clearly in the last Eurock book Music & the Second Culture Crash in a piece by Doktor Bob titled How Tech Ate the Music Industry. A firm dedication to the ethos of DIY, Culture & The Music is the reason Eurock has been able to continue evolving creatively all this time...

Mexican Cassette Culture Recordings 1977-1982

The new Vinyl on Demand Mexican Cassette Culture box set offers a flashback to what was perhaps the greatest musical era and some of the most original music produced in the late 1970’s to mid 1980’s.

The musical door was opened to an incredible new chapter for many people in the music-scene; the discovery of an outstanding and amazing Experimental Music from Mexico in 1979 by Archie Patterson of Eurock.

In 1979, Archie started to distribute experimental music primarily released on cassettes, which he had also covered and written about in his magazine Eurock established in 1973.

At that time, visitors from south of the border came to LA bringing Archie music cassettes and LPs, shortly after coming to buy music and take it back to their record stores in Mexico City. A musical link was created that still exists today.

Listeners of Experimental & Electronic Music incl. VOD itself would probably never have heard about such true hidden treasures released on this Box without Eurock and its protagonistic networking, distribution and promotion back then.

This Box covers many of those experimental artists from Mexico such as Aristeo, Via Lactea & Carlos Alvarado, Hilozoizmo, Decibel, Oxomaxoma with Arturo Romo & Jose Alvarez & Miguel A. Ruiz and Voldarepet with Arturo Meza, Juan Wolfang Cruz and Marco A. Godinez.

Today there still is nothing that sounds like what you'll hear when listening to the sounds on these long lost cassette artifacts. In fact, the music never sounded better after to the excellent sonic restoration done by Jos Smolders of Earlabs.

The Mexican Cassette Culture box set offers indisputable proof that music is the one art form that transcends time as well as all cultures and geographical boundaries…

My trip to France was more than I could have ever imagined. The book events at Souffle Continu Records and Les Frigos were a great experience in sharing Eurock’s history and my personal stories with both music lovers and some of the best French experimental musicians over the past 20-30 years. Theo and Bernard at Souffle were fantastic hosts. There I also met Alain Lebon (of the great Soleil Zeuhl label) and Marc Rozenberg of Eskaton (who are releasing a new album soon).

After that I had dinner at the house of my long time friend/ musician Luc Marianni along with Jacques Jeangerard (his latest collaborator) on the fantastic album Numeralogique (Between Light & Sound Waves/ 2), plus Andre Viaud (guitarist of Pataphonie). It was great to sit around the table and have a conversation about music (and other things happening in the world today). Luc's wife Marie, a teacher of English, was translating for hours late into the evening.

The next day was The Les Frigos event which took place in the Urban Sax studio space, which was otherworldly. Attending were a host of French musicians, labels, music fans and people from afar coming to listen, meet and talk. Quad Sax played an amazing, surreal music set, Benoit Garel screened his documentary film Reims 1974…. and my wonderful new friend Marie Marianni helped as translator, helping me to share my Eurock stories with everyone who attended.  I also did a fascinating interview with Gilbert Artman. Benoit filmed everything professionally, including both the Souffle Continue and Les Frigos events.

Following that I visited Yochk’o Seffer again, after our meeting our at Giorgio Gomelsky's ZU Manifestival (1978) in NYC. Seeing his homemade instruments, hearing a preview of his soon to be released newly recorded album, sharing a great Moroccan dinner and filming a multilingual interview aided by Jean-Jacques Leca translation. It was a fantastic evening.

I was fortunate as well to meet up with and film an interview with Ilitch (aka, Thierry Muller) who was one of the original Eurock cassette label artists in 1980. We talked about music extensively and did a short interview where we talked about his musical history and how the music scene has changed today. 

Following Paris, my oldest friends in France Robert & Anny Frances who exported to me the first French album in 1976 for US distribution (and today run the major French concert promotion company FM Productions) were fantastic hosts in the South of France. Anny was a tour guide/ translator extraordinaire and Robert acted as my agent at the 2015 Perpignan Book & Disque Fair. There, he introduced me to the town mayor, as well as arranged interviews for me in the local newspaper and to film an interview with one of my favorite original French artists Pascal Comelade. 

After that, it was off to Barcelona where I had dinner with Victor Nubla (of Macromassa) and Eli Gras (of the La Olla Express label). I also visited the amazing Wah Wah Records where mainman Jordi Segura and I discussed music and future collaborations. 

My biggest, most wonderful surprise was meeting Emmanuelle Parrenin. After a brief encounter in Paris by happenstance at the Eurock Souffle Continu event, she came  by happenstance to Barcelona at the same time I did to rehearse with Pierre Bastien who she now performs with live. We shared a great dinner, filmed a short interview and she agreed as well to do a written interview after I returned to the USA.

In the late 1970’s she disappeared from the French scene for over 20 years after recording the adventurous classic French folk album Maison Rose. Here, I have the great pleasure of presenting that written interview to you. Emmanuelle herself, her music and her story are an example of the power music has to convey magic as well as withstand the test of time and create a deep emotional connection, which has the ability to heal both the body and soul.

In the future, the French trip will be documented  in a Eurock film and a New Eurock book will be published devoted to Urban Sax. Details will be forthcoming as the projects unfold. Stay tuned to this website as well as my personal Facebook page for more information.