Programm 1

The first Din A Testbild album has always felt like a wild outlier in any of its multiple contexts – it’s not quite Neue Deutsche Welle; it doesn’t really fit the more industrial/noise-based music it could have been aligned with (founder member Gudrun Gut was in Einstürzende Neubauten for a brief period); and despite the patronage of Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, who produced and released the album, it’s way removed from the Berlin School of Electronics. Instead, it’s a curious, unpredictable half-hour of experiment, with basic, repetitive chants coasting over drums that borrow transcendent monotony from Krautrock, while noisy, churning electronics weave between, or blast open the rhythm section. Sometimes, they wind back to a more pensive abstraction, as on the backwards loops of “No Repeat”, or the queasy arpeggios of “DNS Of Time” – but throughout, Programm 1 never quite does what you’d expect it to.