Berlin Sampler: A Century of Music, from Cabaret to Techno

By Théo Lessour

A fascinating account, both pop and scholarly, of Berlin's musical history. History has struck Berlin like few other cities, and this book aims to guide the reader through its musical meanderings. The city danced on the volcano of hyperinflation and the post-war period to the sounds of Kurt Weill's cabaret and the Blue Angel, musical expressionism, and Dada. Swing was played clandestinely under the Nazi dictatorship and the Allied bombs, then rock under the communist regime. Its location as a capitalist island behind the Iron Curtain made it a haven for deviant sounds: krautrock, the cosmic ambient of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, the furious madness of Einstürzende Neubauten, Blixa Bargeld and the Dilettant Brilliant movement, and the blues of Nick Cave. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, taking advantage of its vast empty spaces, it was only natural that it reinvented itself as the European capital of techno.

ISBN: 978-2361399870