NWW: Grauzone
13 June 2007 :: posted by Missingtoof
Grauzone (grey zone) was a music/art project started by brothers Martin Eicher, Stephan Eicher in Germany Switzerland circa 1978. The duo used synthesizers, light effects and super-8 film projections in their act. Publisher of punk magazine “No Fun” Urs Staiger helped Grauzone in the studio and they began recording numerous singles & in 1981 they released their first & only full length title ‘Grauzone’.
Grauzone - “Der Weg Zu Zweit” (mp3)
Grauzone - “Raum” (mp3)
Undoubtedly, the groups most know track has to be Eisbaer, which literally means Ice Bear. It reached the top ten on the German charts shortly after it’s release. Over the years the song has been sampled & covered by numerous artists.
Grauzone - “Eisbaer” (mp3)
In 1997 trance producer Frédéric De Backer released a tranced up version of Eisbaer under the moniker ‘Groovezone’ which quickly became a rave classic.
Groovezone - “Eisbaer” (mp3)
If you listen closely you can tell that Ladytron samples the song on “Fighting In Built Up Areas”.
Ladytron - “Fighting In Built Up Areas” (mp3)
& Berlin based electro trashers Glamour To Kill cover the track.
Glamour To Kill - “Eisbaer” (Grauzone cover) (mp3)
Grauzone only released their one album but they released a series of 7 inch singles over the years & in 1998 a collective called ‘Die Sunrise Tapes’ was released on Play It Again Sam records which you can get here. If you want prefer vinyl gemm has the original 12 inch & various 7 inches for sale, some going for 150 plus!
June 13th, 2007 at 9.40 am
yeah, they had some great tracks. but i think they were from switzerland, not from germany…
June 13th, 2007 at 12.23 pm
subwave (hello!) is right about this. Grauzone originated from Switzerland and Stephan Eicher is touring till today, doing kind of chanson/singersongwriter stuff in different languages:
http://www.stephaneicher.com/
Switzerland was a great place for wave/NDW in the early 80s, unfortunatly most of the stuff is really hard to get, check out Starter, f.e., my favorite from that time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvninSV_MDY
their best song “part of me” featured on a gommagang compilation a couple of years ago, I´ll upload this soon.
all the best from Berlin
Endi
June 13th, 2007 at 2.25 pm
“Eisbaer” is an awesome karaoke song. even if you don’t really speak german. yup.
June 13th, 2007 at 3.53 pm
true, true, they were from switzerland, my bad. all the info i had on them was in german, made it hard to interpret where they were from.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11.10 am
[...] über Groovezone „Eisbaer“ bis zum Grauzonecover. Also ran und klick dich auf die Seite … http://this.bigstereo.net/2007/06/13/nww-grauzone/ ! – ein Tier im Visier [...]