1972
German Oak
02. Down In The Bunker (17:57)
03. Raid Over Duesseldorf (15:42)
04. 1945 - Out Of The Ashes (2:13)
Witch & Warlock 1992 CD bonus tracks:
01. Swastika Rising (4:55)
02. The Third Reich (10:18)
03. Shadows Of War (5:54)
-a. Rain Of Destruction
-b. V1 To London
2018
Down In The Bunker
101. Screaming Skeletons
102. Missile Song
103. Belle's Song
104. Nothing
201. Belle's Song (Extended)
202. Missile Song (Extended)
301. Bear Song
302. Happy Stripes (On Cats)
303. Ghost Guitar
304. Bear Song (Alternative)
305. Harpy & Peregrine
306. Python Vs. Tiger
307. Giant Rock; Boulder Golem
Packaged in a four-panel wallet with a 20-page booklet featuring liner notes in English and German. Track times do not appear on the release, taken from computer.
"Producer's note: At the band's request, the Nazi speeches included on Manfred Uhr's Witch and Warlock German Oak CDs have been removed, and, at [Wolfgang Franz] Czaika's request, the songs have been retitled... Czaika and the band didn't choose the titles given to their songs when Uhr initially released them... On this anthology, the two long songs from the original German Oak album have been pitch corrected to play at the speed that the band recorded them; Manfred Uhr sped them up for the album's initial release..." (liner notes)
"The 6th entry in the Now-Again Reserve Edition series is the definitive reissue of a lauded and misunderstood Krautrock album as well as the first band-sanctioned reissue in the series. The most mysterious Krautrock album, German Oak's Down In The Bunker has been fetishized and demonized, lauded and misunderstood for nearly four decades. In this definitive Reserve Edition of the album, the German Oak trio – together again after 30 years apart – have approved the remastering of their 70s music; finally tell the story behind the creation of their dark, brooding album – and the occult-obsessed record collector behind the original album's release and its myth – and they share previously unreleased music and photos. This three CD set presents the album as it was initially released, the previously unreleased full versions of the two main songs on the original album, and other songs by the band, both rare and previously unreleased."
"The four tracks from the original German Oak album have been restored from vinyl. The remaining tracks were taken from cassette, and have been treated with similar reverb and compression to those Manfred Uhr used for the original album's issue." (liner notes)
"Missile Song" - originally issued as "Down In The Bunker"
"Belle's Song" - originally issued as "Raid Over Düsseldorf"
"Nothing" - originally issued as "1945 - Out Of The Ashes"
Originally issued as "German Oak" Bunker Records BU-1 72
"Bear Song" - originally issued as "The Third Reich"
"Python Vs. Tiger" - originally issued as "Swastika Rising"
Originally issued on "German Oak" Witch and Warlock CD W&W 004
"Ghost Guitar" - originally issued as "Nibelungenlied I: Siegfried Krimhild"
"Harpy & Peregrine" - originally issued as "Gunter & Brunhild"
"Giant Rock; Boulder Golem" - originally issued as "Nibelungenlied II: Krimhild & Etzel; Final Fights Death"
Originally issued on "Nibelungenlied" Witch and Warlock CD W&W 006
"Missile Song (Extended)", "Belle's Song (Extended)", "Happy Stripes (On Cats)" and "Bear Song (Alternate)" previously unreleased.
Bass Guitar – Harry Kallweit (tracks: 1-2, 2-2, 3-1, 3-4), Rolf Mors
Drums – Ulrich Kallweit
Lead Guitar – Wolfgang Franz Czaika
Organ – Manfred Uhr (tracks: 1-1, 1-4)
Rhythm Guitar – Norbert Luckas (tracks: 1-1, 1-4)
Drums – Ulrich Kallweit
Lead Guitar – Wolfgang Franz Czaika
Organ – Manfred Uhr (tracks: 1-1, 1-4)
Rhythm Guitar – Norbert Luckas (tracks: 1-1, 1-4)
The first and only LP by Düsseldorf’s German Oak isn’t the absolute rarest krautrock record in existence, but it’s up there. Its backstory ticks all the hyperobscurity collector cliché boxes: released during a burgeoning period for strange, indulgent music from the Fatherland (1972), at the behest of an overbearing manager as clueless about the market as his charges. Pressed privately in tiny numbers, most copies remained unsold, until leaking onto the collector market in the 1980s.
Until now, anyone who’d heard (of) its nightmarish proto-industrial space jams, seen its extraordinary black metal demotape-alike sleeve art, and wanted to cradle their own copy could either pay hundreds of quid for an original or much less for a snide reissue. That’s changed thanks to American archive label Now-Again – specifically Now-Again Reserve, their sublabel for unfeasible rarities – who’ve come through with a hulking remastered triple-disc package, extensive bonus material and an illuminating interview with German Oak guitarist Wolfgang Czaika.
Anyone previously familiar with German Oak will notice a few changes. Firstly, it’s not called that any more, it’s titled Down In The Bunker, a reference to the subterranean second world war-era bolthole in which the album was recorded. The song titles have changed, too. German Oak never bothered with such things, so their manager and sometime organist Manfred Uhr chose them. The group’s Malcolm McLaren or John Sinclair figure, if evidently without the marketing nous, Uhr pushed the ‘bunker’ theme to the hilt: the LP’s brief intro and outro pieces, which bookend two epic workouts, were titled ‘Airalert’ and ‘1945 – Out Of The Ashes’ (now ‘Screaming Skeletons’ and ‘Nothing’). This is already chancing your arm in Germany, so the unreleased cuts Uhr dug up for a quasi-bootleg early 90s CD issue – including songs he’d named ‘Swastika Rising’ and samples of Hitler speeches – shone a light on the band they’d done pretty much nothing to encourage. Which is why they’ve retitled everything and excised the dodgy samples.
That said, German Oak’s music is often noxious and creepy enough to feel like an antecedent of some of the underground’s notable fash-flirters: Death In June, Current 93 and Coil seem to be born in the 19-minute ‘Missile Song’, which cycles through clanging metallic percussion, ultra-sparse crypto-jazz drumming, a bass sound beamed in from a deep bath next door, outbreaks of haphazard haunted house onomatopoeia by unnamed instruments. It’s a bit ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’, early Faust, Sun Ra even, but sonically stunning for three rudderless rock trippers who basically just tossed this onto tape with no real thought about what might become of it.
‘Belle’s Song’, at 16-and-a-half minutes, is the original LP’s other main event, and the railroad boogie rhythm at its core cleaves closer to rock convention – the more eccentric end of it though, certainly. Groundhogs fans might well dig on this fuzz and wah and chug, for example, even/especially when Czaika bends his guitar off the map in sick psych style and Ulli Kallweit’s drumming breaks for the border with buoyant freeness in the closing moments.
The extended and alternate takes which fill discs two and three are divertingly gnarly, but don’t indicate much obvious potential for German Oak to have become pored over by obsessive live bootleg collectors, Grateful Dead or Velvet Underground style. The original edits of ‘Belle’s Song’ and ‘Missile Song’ run to 26 and 34 minutes respectively – I’m reviewing the CD version here and am curious as to how the latter fits onto one side of vinyl – and become slightly more and slightly less weird, also respectively, in doing so. ‘Missile’ is gussied up with lengthy periods of hard rock scorch which is perfectly decent in itself, but a distraction from the eldritch immersion created by the edit; ‘Belle’ fleshes out the rubbery reverbed guitar sound that Czaika switches to having departed the boogie rhythm.
The remaining seven songs were recorded in Czaika’s house, and find German Oak getting riffier and more Hendrixian: things like ‘The Bear Song’ (retitled from ‘The Third Reich’ – I call this an example of the great German humour, except not sarcastically) and ‘Python Vs Tiger’ burble along with a pleasingly lumpen tone and the suspicion that a majority of LSD-using experimental rock bands of the era had rehearsals that sounded much like this. Although this release is the very first to have the full collaborative approval of the German Oak members, even this comes with a caveat: Czaika dismisses their entire output in the interview as “musical scrap and waste … sins of our youth”. The ever-swelling reissue market teems with variations on this, of course: one-time, one-shot lost crazies tracked down only to express (sincere or otherwise) astonishment that anyone might now care about their throwaway hobby band. Not many of them are dug up with as much tender care as Now-Again offer, and few of them sound as unearthly and ahead of their time as German Oak.
Julian Cope Review of original album:
In the strange Olympic summer of 1972, the Dusseldorf instrumental group German Oak entered the Luftschutzbunker, or Air Raid Shelter, in order to record their eponymous first LP. Following in the footsteps of the percussive and organic Organisation and the remarkable Dom, German Oak had every reason to believe that this 3rd LP to be recorded by a Dusseldorf band would be warmly received. Unfortunately, German Oak were not only wrong in their assumptions that locals would embrace their music, but even local record shops rejected all the group's attempts to sell the albums in city outlets. Such was their lack of success that 202 of the original 213 copies were stored in the basement of the group's organist until the mid-1980s, when a thirst for undiscovered Krautrock finally brought German Oak back from the dead.
But what is the sound of a group that was so rejected during its time of recording? Well, imagine a brutally recorded, brazen and ultra-skeletal industrial white funk played with all the claw-handed crowbar technique of the Red Crayola recording their famous "Hurricane Fighter Plane," over which is superimposed the what-instrument-could-that-be rumblings of Gunther Schickert's G.A.M. meeting the Electronic Meditation incarnation of early-T. Dream. That is the sound of German Oak. Imagine Faust's reverb-y schoolroom in Wumme being party to a jam between Riot-period Sly Stone on itchy-scratchy bass and the pre-Kraftwerk ensemble Organisation (specifically "Milk Rock"), without their being formally introduced, and with all the hang-ups that this would entail. Again, this is the sound of German Oak.
It is a strangely skin-of-your-teeth genius. It is a toe-curlingly heartfelt method acting of the most in-your-face kind. In places it's a sort of gormless Gong, even a moronic Magma - a Teutonic tribe standing in the ruins of some Roman temple, playing barbarian riffs on classical instruments too sizes too small. Aerosmith's Joe Perry once said: "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." He must have been listening to German Oak.
With German Oak, what seems, after two minutes, to be a simplistic and worryingly trite riff, becomes, after 8 minutes, to be the only real-honest-riff-in-town. Like the legendary death-blues of Josephus' (also 16-minutes-plus) epic "Dead Man", this is music which does not hit you instantly in the face, but is an accumulative groove, building and building on the endless repetition of some bog-standard soul-type "Please Please Please" bass line or rhythm guitar sequence.1
There is a remarkable space within German Oak's music, which may have been caused by their ultra-rudimentary playing, or may have been because they just listened ultra-attentively to each other as each player struggled for the notes. But, whatever the reason, German Oak conjured up a mythical sound in the grand Krautrock tradition. And as a quintet without a lead singer, they were a rare five-piece who never got in each other's way. Throughout the music of German Oak, the bass and the lead guitar are frequently mistakable for each other, until the fuzzy lead will slowly claw itself out of the sonic mire of sound and drag itself arduously and inelegantly to the top of the heap. The drumming is often furious and even overplayed, yet it is often the single constant of the group.
Perhaps German Oak hit the nail on the head when they credited group members as the "Crew" and refused to give full names. Such was their sense of space that they often sounded like a trio and actually never like five people. Perhaps, like Can, they worked in pairs and recorded in parallel as opposed to one live performance. But somehow I doubt it. The recording quality and attention to sound separation is far too slack and haphazard. No, I'm sure the reason that the characterless "crew" credit sums up German Oak's attitude best, is because it conspires to make them all sound like the dwarves whose job it was to hold up the four corners of the Viking world-view. Separately they were nothing - together they were everything.
Wolfgang Franz Czaika, here known only as Caesar, is credited with "Lead- & Rhythmguitar". The busy flourishes of insistent drumming are by Ullrich Kallweit, here known only as Ulli "Drums/Percussion". His brother Harry Kallweit, just known as Harry, contributes "Electric bass/voice". This leaves the tail-gunners' places to be filled by the wonderfully-named Manfred Uhr AKA Warlock on "Organ/fuzz-organ/voice" and Norbert Luckas AKA Nobbi on "Guitar/A77/Noises". And, like the simple Amon Duul 1 credits, the friendly nick-names make the group appear even more mysterious and out-of-reach.
The German Oak LP consisted of two very long Krautgrooves, one on either side, with a short organ themed instrumental intro and outro at the beginning and end. Side One begins like a crusty hunt led by hunt saboteurs, as the one minute and fifty seconds of "Airalert" fades in from the mists of time with a hopeful and entirely amateurly recorded organ. Side One is then given over to the enormous eighteen-minutes of "Down in the Bunker", where feedback whistles and screams and factory interior-sized organ roars, whilst relentless hammering on metal suggests that the workers are in there building something over the din. Portentous manically-bowed cello-style film theme bass guitar and scraping cymbals rise out of the maelstrom to prepare the listener for the onslaught to come. Sonically, it is pure sound, like the primal intro beauty of G.A.M.'s 1976 album, or the pure sound of Guru Gurus's UFO, and the opening section of Ash Ra Tempel's "Amboss".
As though recorded in a deep river gorge from beyond time with dozens of old fridges and cookers strewn across its banks, this proto-industrial sound truly invokes the ancestors. And it is perfectly understandable that German Oak's sleeve notes read: "As we played down there in the old bunker, suddenly a strange atmosphere began to work. The ghosts of the passed whispered." Far from being deluded, German Oak's crew are understating - for this track is alive with the dead, awash with a flood of ur-spirits from the recent past and the days of Yore. Banshee-like glissando guitars and Mani Neumaier-like voices creep up the north side of the track, mount the battlements and howl at us and the members of the group.
Side Two begins with the reverb'd minor key horseback charge of "Raid Over Dusseldorf". The whole bulk of side two is taken up by this furious and rudimentary psychedelic ride, reminiscent of the Chocolate Watchband. Indeed, my friend and Brain Donor guitar cohort Doggen has suggested that it is the rhythm of the horse which heavy rock most often emulates. I would tend to agree with this assertion, as this rhythm can be found everywhere in rock, from the central spine of the Doors' "Roadhouse Blues" to the middle of David Bowie's "Width of a Circle". And I would even cite Robert Browning's 19th Century poem "How they brought the good news from Aix to Ghent" as an example of how pre-rock'n'roll this rhythm really is.
The final track of the album is the 2-minutes short "1945 - Out of the Ashes", which returns to the organ-led hunting sound of the opening "Airalert" before cross-fading into the tolling of a lone bell.
Though I am rarely a fan of extra tracks being added to CD reissues, we must count ourselves lucky in this case to have been handed the three superb pre-LP German Oak workouts located herein. The five-minute "Swastika Rising" sounds like the Plastic Ono Band meeting both Faust and Organisation; all rudimentary organ, splatter drums and a barely coherent and wandering psychedelic fuzz guitar. Following this, the ten-minute "The Third Reich" starts with a Hitler Rally speech, before slipping inside yet another hypnotic and insistently mesmerising teen Funkadelic groove with scything and Scythian psychedelic guitar. A brazen disabled lead guitar mindlessly scatters seedling riffs across an infertile field of unidirectional bass riffing and extremely formulaic drum fills, played relentlessly and robotically. The final extra track, "Shadows of War", is like an overladen Chinook helicopter struggling to lift off from its pad; the organ chords seemingly weighted down by the reverb'd wodges of clawed bass. Then another Hitler Rally cut-up sends us into a collage of over hasty milk delivery as an obligatory Stuka raid finally cuts us down in a single all-terminal bomb blast.2
I noted in Krautrocksampler that the German postwar youth scene was trying to work itself free of its recent Holocaust history, and German Oak in particular seem to have wrestled with these demons for longer than most. Their sleeve-note dedication seems all-the-more poignant and moving for its bathos and poor translation:
"We dedicate this record to our parents which had a bad time in World War 2."
Down In The Bunker review...
The first and only LP by Düsseldorf’s German Oak isn’t the absolute rarest krautrock record in existence, but it’s up there. Its backstory ticks all the hyperobscurity collector cliché boxes: released during a burgeoning period for strange, indulgent music from the Fatherland (1972), at the behest of an overbearing manager as clueless about the market as his charges. Pressed privately in tiny numbers, most copies remained unsold, until leaking onto the collector market in the 1980s.
Until now, anyone who’d heard (of) its nightmarish proto-industrial space jams, seen its extraordinary black metal demotape-alike sleeve art, and wanted to cradle their own copy could either pay hundreds of quid for an original or much less for a snide reissue. That’s changed thanks to American archive label Now-Again – specifically Now-Again Reserve, their sublabel for unfeasible rarities – who’ve come through with a hulking remastered triple-disc package, extensive bonus material and an illuminating interview with German Oak guitarist Wolfgang Czaika.
Anyone previously familiar with German Oak will notice a few changes. Firstly, it’s not called that any more, it’s titled Down In The Bunker, a reference to the subterranean second world war-era bolthole in which the album was recorded. The song titles have changed, too. German Oak never bothered with such things, so their manager and sometime organist Manfred Uhr chose them. The group’s Malcolm McLaren or John Sinclair figure, if evidently without the marketing nous, Uhr pushed the ‘bunker’ theme to the hilt: the LP’s brief intro and outro pieces, which bookend two epic workouts, were titled ‘Airalert’ and ‘1945 – Out Of The Ashes’ (now ‘Screaming Skeletons’ and ‘Nothing’). This is already chancing your arm in Germany, so the unreleased cuts Uhr dug up for a quasi-bootleg early 90s CD issue – including songs he’d named ‘Swastika Rising’ and samples of Hitler speeches – shone a light on the band they’d done pretty much nothing to encourage. Which is why they’ve retitled everything and excised the dodgy samples.
That said, German Oak’s music is often noxious and creepy enough to feel like an antecedent of some of the underground’s notable fash-flirters: Death In June, Current 93 and Coil seem to be born in the 19-minute ‘Missile Song’, which cycles through clanging metallic percussion, ultra-sparse crypto-jazz drumming, a bass sound beamed in from a deep bath next door, outbreaks of haphazard haunted house onomatopoeia by unnamed instruments. It’s a bit ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’, early Faust, Sun Ra even, but sonically stunning for three rudderless rock trippers who basically just tossed this onto tape with no real thought about what might become of it.
‘Belle’s Song’, at 16-and-a-half minutes, is the original LP’s other main event, and the railroad boogie rhythm at its core cleaves closer to rock convention – the more eccentric end of it though, certainly. Groundhogs fans might well dig on this fuzz and wah and chug, for example, even/especially when Czaika bends his guitar off the map in sick psych style and Ulli Kallweit’s drumming breaks for the border with buoyant freeness in the closing moments.
The extended and alternate takes which fill discs two and three are divertingly gnarly, but don’t indicate much obvious potential for German Oak to have become pored over by obsessive live bootleg collectors, Grateful Dead or Velvet Underground style. The original edits of ‘Belle’s Song’ and ‘Missile Song’ run to 26 and 34 minutes respectively – I’m reviewing the CD version here and am curious as to how the latter fits onto one side of vinyl – and become slightly more and slightly less weird, also respectively, in doing so. ‘Missile’ is gussied up with lengthy periods of hard rock scorch which is perfectly decent in itself, but a distraction from the eldritch immersion created by the edit; ‘Belle’ fleshes out the rubbery reverbed guitar sound that Czaika switches to having departed the boogie rhythm.
The remaining seven songs were recorded in Czaika’s house, and find German Oak getting riffier and more Hendrixian: things like ‘The Bear Song’ (retitled from ‘The Third Reich’ – I call this an example of the great German humour, except not sarcastically) and ‘Python Vs Tiger’ burble along with a pleasingly lumpen tone and the suspicion that a majority of LSD-using experimental rock bands of the era had rehearsals that sounded much like this. Although this release is the very first to have the full collaborative approval of the German Oak members, even this comes with a caveat: Czaika dismisses their entire output in the interview as “musical scrap and waste … sins of our youth”. The ever-swelling reissue market teems with variations on this, of course: one-time, one-shot lost crazies tracked down only to express (sincere or otherwise) astonishment that anyone might now care about their throwaway hobby band. Not many of them are dug up with as much tender care as Now-Again offer, and few of them sound as unearthly and ahead of their time as German Oak.
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