Peter Baumann: Repeat Repeat – US – CD [2022]

1. Repeat Repeat
2. Home Sweet Home
3. Deccadance
4. Realtimes
5. M.A.N. Series Two
6. Brain Damage
7. Kinky Dinky
8. Daytime Logic
9. Playland Pleasure
10. What Is Your Use?

I last wrote about this before it was released by Rubellan Remasters over two years ago. At the time I was “trying to cut down” and spend less on music as his label was ramping up the productions. Then we spent a year saving for a big trip that put the brakes on all but minimal music spending. So there were lots of releases by Rubellan that have been out there and now I’m catching up. Unfortunately, I’m doing do before it’s too late since Scott Davies, who was the label, has decided to close up shop in the harsh environment that reissue CD concerns now exist in. The US labels have made it clear that CD reissues are absolutely not where their interests lay.

I was never really a Tangerine Dream fan. I only ever had/heard their cut-out “Sorcerer” OST; the final album made with Baumann before he left to go solo in 1977. I’d heard the single “Daytime Logic” back when this album was released in America in 1982. It marked what felt like a huge pivot to New Wave forms by the former Tangerine Dream synthesist. It caught my ear but things were moving quickly back then, and I never acted on it. I can’t say I’ve even seen a copy in the last 30 years, but as of 1990 this is exactly the sort of album I’m strongly drawn to. The fact that it was co-produced by Robert Palmer is now a huge pull for me. Palmer’s outside production was not prolific, but what I’ve heard I’ve really liked.

It’s crazy, but when I hear the tempo, and vibe to the title track to “Repeat repeat” I can’t help thinking what the [German producer] Peter Wolf was thinking of when he arranged Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” into the somewhat crass pop monster that it was. But crass was a charge that could never be leveled at this far quirkier pop song. Cheerful synths swirled like organs in the song as Mr. Baumann applied his voice to the terse, spartan lyric that cut through the song like an existential haiku. Citing how there really wasn’t anything new [under the sun] in a feeling that’s only grown stronger over the last four decades.

The soundscape here was crisp, cheerful, and minimal with banks of synths used strategically to fill out the sound with a real band playing guitars and drums. As the wildly careening guitar riffs entered the song at the middle eight like horses braying. Through it all the rhythm section, never let up as the measured, yet relentless pace.

The next track, “Home Sweet Home” had a loping beat with Baumann singing over it in a matter of fact drawl and tone that strongly suggested the notion of Lou Reed fronting YMO! While vocoders played call and response with his lead vocal. Richie Fletcher’s guitar solo was deliciously.

“Deccadance” was the sort of electronic sound that showed the analog peak of the form in 1981 just as digital glassiness was barging into the room. This was a rich and zesty mix of fluid and liquid envelopes and the sort of bespoke synthesizer technology that his peers Kraftwerk and YMO also had the budget for at this time when OMD were buying their first monosynth from a catalog on a weekly payment plan. It’s telling that the album credits cited a custom synth design by Dipl.-Inf. Andreas Bahrdt. 1981 was exactly the time that this sort of technological outsplash was at its peak, for an old guard like Baumann who could command the budget to make it happen.

The stately pulsating tempo that anchored the German-only single “Realtimes” was one occasion here where the guitars and drums took the lead and synthesizers were relegated to rhythmic input. The plaintive, soaring melodic solo in the middle eight seemed to be guitar instead, though I may be wrong there. Baumann still sounded here like Lou Reed celebrating the Average Joe he was trying to connect with on “Coney Island Baby.” The overall vibe was not unlike a lost track from Eno’s “Taking Tiger Mountain [By Strategy].”

“M.A.N. Series Two” was a slightly disturbing slice of robofunk. A darker take on the themes of “Man Machine” but with slight squirts of organ breaking the technological sheen to be found elsewhere in the song. The spare lyrics were voiced by Baumann with his voice couched in effects; for gone reason this time. The enervated “Brain Damage” was injected with synth rhythm fills jolting the listener every few bars. posited the effects of a mental breakdown in the technomediasphere of 1981! Surely by 2024 we all have brain damage! [don’t answer that…] When the song ended on a cold drum fill I half expected Robert Palmer’s own Electro classic,“You Are In My System” to immediately follow! I just inserted it in my playback and it all glides like a Rolls. That single was two years out from this album, but it’s obvious that Palmer was not above using the production of this album as his own R+D lab at the time.

The loping, jovial “Kinky Dinky” was as far removed from the Berlin School as one could travel. It being a highly synthetic, sympathetic portrait of a misunderstood loner rendered as a rolling, synthetic Boogie Woogie. Hitting a vibe target close to Peter Gabriel’s “A Wonderful Day In A One Way World.”

The US single was “Daytime Logic,” and I can see why. The urgent congas added a lot of sauce to the mix while the foghorn synth hooks added leftfield anxiety to the mix. All the while the base synth pattern chugged away relentlessly. It had an early DEVO feel that appeals and the lyrics were the least likely version of a marriage proposal possible, unless you want your idea of a marriage to be shot through with nailbiting tension.

“Playland Pleasure” was a song about clebrating the cover art of the album; the world of video games. Which in 1981 was eating the music industry for breakfast as kids were feeding the video games instead of the record stores with their lunch money. It sounds very ironic today, but obviously Baumann was swept up in the fad that turned out to be a lifestyle. The closing “What Is Your Use?” is perhaps the most direct and disquieting question imaginable. Yet it fits right into the somewhat clinical mindset that informs the songs on this album. Posing thoughts and ideas that were so prosaic that they managed to eke out a berth next to projects like Bill Nelson’s Red Noise.

This was an album that was pretty far removed from the fluid space rock of Tangerine Dream and coming off of an album like “Clues” with the song “Looking For Clues,” it made great sense for Robert Palmer of all people to get involved with the production of this album! I’d really like to know the story behind how this managed to happen. I knew that I was going to find this one a delight, but it’s managed to exceed my expectations and has more than earned its space in my Record Cell. As ever, the mastering by Rubellan Remasters is top quality sonic goods that showcases the lush, bubbling analog synths on display here to their best benefit. Where all of that dynamic range on the mastertape is reaching my headphones.

It’s a knife in the guts knowing that Rubellan won’t be issuing any more CDs like this one, but Scott Davies has more than earned his mastering wings as that sideline of his predated his stab at running his own reissue label. He’s mastered the odd title that he hasn’t issued in the last several years, and I can only hope that he keeps his fingers in that pie. In the meantime, there are a finite amount of copies of “Repeat Repeat” in his webstore and they are priced to move at $12.99 so if you like your technopop served up warm and rich then DJ hit that button!

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