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Baker's Dozen

Energy Capture: Byetone's Favourite Albums
Christian Eede , June 8th, 2016 08:39

The producer and co-founder of Raster-Noton talks Christian Eede through a "rock-oriented" selection of his favourite records as the pioneering German electronic music label celebrate two decades of operations

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Eno – Here Come The Warm Jets
What is it you like especially about Eno's debut album and this particular sound in his career?

There is this really loud hi-hat on the opening track, which I especially love. For me, it sounds like very experimental music but it's still connected to pop and it's very fun. This is something I also miss today – maybe there could be more of that kind of experimentation like he also did with Talking Heads. It's all very future-oriented, forward-thinking music, but it's still completely pop. I especially love the first track on this album. I do also love Eno's later ambient works of course, but this is my favourite album of his.

This would have been an album that I can imagine you discovered while young and growing up in East Germany, so I just wondered how that experience was of finding new music like this at that time?

It's still a surprise to me. We had all the access to West German radio still, but sometimes the music may arrive with us one year later than everyone else. In general though, it was actually much easier to listen to progressive, experimental music because at this time we had radio stations that would play unusual music. During the night especially, we had wonderful radio programmes and it was very normal to sit with a tape machine and record from the radio. I'm really surprised looking back that we had a really good overview of the underground scene, but we thought that everybody in the Western world knew this music too. We didn't recognise that this music was still minority music, so we probably had more access overall to the experimental music than, let's say, the commercial side of the music business.