Aksak Maboul – Saure Gurke {1977}
Here’s some great weird electronic music by Aksak Maboul from Belgium. This track “Saure Gurke” (“Sour Pickle” in German) from their first album Onze danses pour combattre la migraine from 1977 anticipates keyboard patterns that Detroit’s Techno scene seemingly adopted only about 10 years later. On their second release Un peu de l’âme des bandits, the founders Marc Hollander & Vincent Kenis cooperated with Fred Frith and Chris Cutler (of Henry Cow) and explored numerous styles and weird combinations of music from Bulgarian voices to Tango and Punk. Another amazing and visionary track is Scratch Holiday from 1984 that sounds like a premature version of Kompakt’s Dettinger from 1998 or Wolfgang Voigt’s project GAS starting in 1996. They’re still around and were touring in 2015. The Belgian label Crammed Discs just re-released Onze danses pour combattre la migraine on vinyl, so grab it while you can and have a look around on the label’s website, it’s worth it – as Vincent Kenis also produced the Congotronics series for example.