#ostalgia

East German Shepherds, from Zersetzung series. I just published a small teaser of this documentary on my website: www.pawelstarzec.com/zersetzung

"After unification, that is after 1989, no one in Eastern Germany wanted to ride a Trabant and no one wanted to have an East German shepherd. Everyone wanted to ride a Golf and have a shepherd from the West, so for many years you couldn't sell puppies, nobody wanted them. Then people saw that Western Shepherds were sick, but they noticed it too late." – Heike, owner of a small herd of DDR German Shepherds and a breeder.

So much has been said about postmodern art by people who are much smarter than me and better versed in the topic that it's hard to say something beyond the obvious. But have you ever thought about how right the people who predicted the end of history after the end of socialism? If all the arguments in the West really subsided for a while after that, then in the East there was such a crisis in people's minds that difficult to describe. It feeled something like that (yes, he is dead):

Time has passed. A new generation has grown up who have not seen socialism. And they already perceived him only through stories, and these stories talked about directly opposite things. And then there was the Internet, which made it so that people began to receive only the information they wanted. In short, everyone has lost touch with reality.

What does this have to do with music? The music that tried to make sense of this was also divided into before and after. Here is an example of two compositions. In principle, they have the same theme — rely on the future generation. One was written during socialism, the other after (both songs are good). The first is a collection of real values of the time, the other is an empty aesthetic.

Why is there a demand among young people for the aesthetics of something that has been over for 30 years? It may be hard to understand in the West, but this is not nostalgia for the past. It's nostalgia for an unfulfilled future. Those who did not find that time and do not study it fully as a historian will not be able to understand how people felt then, because so much has changed now. But some people still want to believe in these ideas of light future, so they cling to the simplest thing that lies on the surface — symbols.

Rhys Fulber – Ostalgia (Sonic Groove, SGLP06/SGCD06)

Our Wednesday selection: Rhys Fulber – Ostalgia (Sonic Groove, SGLP06/SGCD06)

Ostalgia is Rhys Fulber’s second album for Sonic Groove following the success of last year’s Your Dystopia, My Utopia. Like its predecessor, it continues his interest in pushing new boundaries in industrial techno, with kicks and bass lines woven together with clinical precision to cause intense speaker pressure, and…