Thirsty Moon-Thirsty Moon-'72 BRAIN German progressive rock-NEW LP

$

36

Thirsty Moon
by Thirsty Moon

NEW LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Gatefold

 Thirsty Moon by Thirsty Moon (Vinyl, Jun-2013, Long Hair)

Here's the reissue of a true gem from German progressive rock history.
This seven man band combined the spontaneous elements of jazz with the power of and rhythm of rock, which resulted in an exciting and pretty much unique style.

This album, originally released in 1972 by Brain Records, is recommended to all fans of the genre! With linernotes by member J?rgen Drogies and digitally remastered .

Tracklist

A1    Morning Sun    5:24
A2    Love Me    3:54
A3    Rooms Behind Your Mind    3:18
A4    Big City    8:31
B    Yellow Sunshine    21:30

In the early 1970ies the Krautrock scene in Bremen was eking out a shadowy existence, in contrast to the important music centres Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf and –to a degree - Cologne. Many important record labels were based in these cities and there was plenty on offer for Krautrock enthusiasts. Countless bands came and went. There seemed to be a never ending influx into the scene cities of technically experienced musicians eager to experiment. The Drogies brothers in Bremen, however, had a lot of difficulties finding new members ready to leave the trodden path of copying English or American pop music and to follow new paths after their band DRP had split up. In the first part of his report that marks the beginning of the Thirsty Moon series appearing on Long Hair, which will comprise the first three albums of the band to begin with, as well as the so far unpublished recording of a concert on 29.05.1975 in Bremen’s scene club “Lila Eule (Purple Owl)”, Jürgen Drogies recounts how Thirsty Moon were founded and how the first album was recorded.

“The end of the 1960ies and the early 1970ies weren’t a particularly good time for bands. The boom of “beat music” had just passed, in the discos DJs were drawing more people than live acts. This was even true for international stars – Jimi Hendrix and Cream played in the Scala in Herford instead of in sold-out stadiums like they would today.

The magazine “Sounds” had many reports on the label “Ohr”, and on bands that followed new paths, used synthesizers and did not copy Anglo American rock and pop.

My brother Norbert and I had already been through several band projects when we came across the LP “Ikarus” in a local record shop. On the cover we found the address of the producer Jochen Petersen and decided to send him some demos. Our band “DRP” had just split up and we were looking for new members and a new name, since the old name consisted of the abbreviated last names of the former group members (Drogies, Ranwig, Pickert).

Norbert was able to win over Harald Konietzko (bass), who in turn took Willi Pape (saxophone, flute) and Erwin Noack (percussion) into the band. Hans Werner Ranwig (voice, organ) was still left from DRP, and Michael Kobs (Fender Rhodes, Clavinet) became the second keyborder. We rehearsed in a small weekend home in Klein Hollwedel, not far from Bremen.
Harald got us a used Ford Transit as a band bus, and Willi, who was working for an advertising agency, came up with the name – he knew the export beer brand “Thirsty Moon” and named the new group accordingly.


From the very beginning it was difficult to find a common musical denominator. Norbert and I preferred Hendrix and Steve Winwood’s Traffic and favoured song structures with improvised parts in rock music style. Hans Werner “Hucky” Ranwig was also on our side, while all the others had a preference for jazz-rock in the style of Softmachine or Miles Davis’ LP “Bitches Brew”. We recorded the demos in mono with a home tape recorder in the rehearsal room and sent them to Jochen Petersen (later a member of “Randy Pie”) to Hamburg. He actually contacted us and told us about the newly founded label “Brain” that he would be producing for in the future. He invited us to test recordings to Hamburg, with the legendary sound mixer Conny Plank, and we actually made a contract with “Brain”. In 1972 Jochen produced the first LP “Thirsty Moon”, with Conny Plank on 
the mixer. The 16-track recordings took five days and the mix took one day; it was essentially influenced by Conny Plank, with effects such as “tape recorder-flanging” that was created by hand braking one of two tape recorders that were running parallel, Conny was involved in many successful productions as a sound mixer and also as a producer, e.g. Kraftwerk and Neu. Approximately 10 years later he made music history through his cooperation with Ultravox and The Eurythmics.
The record cover of our first LP (and also of the second and third) was designed by Gil Funcius. Later we actually discovered the cover picture of the first album in a pub, where it had been painted on an entire wall.” 
(Jürgen Drogies, July 2006)

Rock critics had a hard time describing the music of the first album. They came up with comparisons to other German bands such as Release Music Orchestra, Kollektiv, Emergency, and perceived influences of Xhol and Organisation (precursor of Kraftwerk) and even of Colloseum and Chicago. However, these comparisons hardly do justice to the music of Thirsty Moon. The album is so diverse that it is virtually impossible to describe. One characteristics of the album’s music is its dynamic play that uses both heavy as well as spacy structures. It ranges from the enjoyable play of the electric piano to jarring eruptions of the saxophone, hard riffs and psychedelic outbursts with tapes running backwards and phasing effects – very remote from usual song structures and the arrangements that usually go with it, but displaying a high degree of musicality and impressive technical skill.

In a radio commentary in 1973 Manfred Miller made the following observations: “The band plays rock music which is influenced in its structure and principles by forms of jazz and the Kollektiv-improvisations.” 
The Sounds critic (4/73) seemed slightly bewildered in his commentary; he thought the band was still on the holding track as far as the market situation in Germany was concerned. In his opinion the first album had a restless anarchic sound that was closer to Softmachine than to Heaven and Colloseum.
Today the album is getting much more favourable reviews and is often called innovative, extraordinary, highly recommended (Gibraltar Encyclopedia), and is even described as “high quality, symphonic progressive jazz-rock among the best that has been published from this genre in Germany” (Baby-Blaue Seiten/Prog-


Reviews/Achim Breiling). The Encyclopedia of Krautrock, “The Crack in the Cosmic Egg”, written by the brothers Steven and Alan Freeman, counts the first two albums of the band among “The Krautrock Top 100”.
When planning the Thirsty Moon series, Jürgen Drogies came across several recordings in his archive (rehearsal room, live, outtakes), which have either been added to the different albums as a bonus track or form an album of their own (“I’ll be back” Thirsty Moon live ’75, LHC 55) Come and rediscover Thirsty Moon - 
you’ll be surprised!