Thought process
“BRAIN GAVE AUTONOMY TO THEIR ARTISTS.”
A smart label for heads: Germany’s Brain. By Jim Irvin.
Brain was a German label that, through the ’70s, represented Germany’s enduring thirst for rock at its most vivid: boogie, metal, shameless shredding or prog that wriggled like jazz, but also avant-garde experiments in sound, electronica and unlikely fusions. It grew out of Metronome, a Swedish jazz label with an office in Hamburg, and was founded by two disgruntled A&R men at Metronome’s contemporary offshoot Ohr, who lobbied for their own imprint to release music by and for the German rock underground. Taking Klaus Schultz, Embryo and Guru Guru with them, they gave autonomy to their artists, aiming to sign, facilitate and encourage without interfering in the creative process. Brain 001 was the moody first album by future metal stalwarts Scorpions, 004 was Neu!’s experimental debut, featuring the peerless Hallogallo (Neu!’s work, tricky to license, does not appear in this box), followed by key releases from theatrical Grobschnitt, minimalist Cluster, heavy Birth Control and many acts barely known outside Germany. They also licensed albums from Britain – Spyrogyra, Caravan, Gryphon and others – and anywhere else with a prog scene, like Finland, which gave them Tasavallan Presidentti. Brain releases have become sought after by fans of psych, prog, early electronica and pioneer metal. The Brain Box – Cerebral Sounds Of Brain Records 19721979 (Universal has 83 songs (many very long) on eight discs, five of highlights, one of tracks from licensed acts and two rare double albums first issued in ’77 and ’78 recorded live at the Brain Festival in Essen, all packaged with a snazzy 76-page hardback book and a tote bag. Highlights: sinewy, mellow Popul Vuh instrumental Engel der Gegenwart from the soundtrack to Herzog’s movie Heart Of Glass; Tasavallan Presidentti’s excellent, slinky Milky Way Moses sounding like a funky Finnish Caravan; Des Zauberers Traum, an early synth experiment by Eroc, AKA Joachim Heinz Ehrig, eccentric drummer with Grobschnitt who was sidelined as a soundman (he also mastered this collection); a chunk of Yatha Sidhra’s dreamy Meditation Mass, an excerpt from Novalis’s symphonic prog debut Banished Bridge; Guru Guru’s Samantha’s Rabbit; Electric Sandwich’s China, akin to Hendrix fronting a school percussion band; Lava’s Tears Are Goin’ Home, like Lemmyera Hawkwind going punk. Brain closed in the ’80s when all this seemed awfully outmoded. You’ll hear a lot of flute solos, jazzy wig-outs, wah wah guitar, cinematic synths and elastic bass lines. Like the company’s oft garish sleeves it hasn’t all aged well, but is still a joyous, generous sample of a stimulating time and place where rock was let out to do as it pleased.