Bleep

Tim Story Boxset Notes

In the 40 years I’ve known him, Hans-Joachim has joked countless times about the ‘hundreds of kilometers’ of reel-to-reel tapes in his archives. The word ‘archives’ conjures images of underground vaults and white-gloved curators, but in Achim’s case it consists of a stack of cardboard boxes in his back room in Baden, bulging with hundreds of reels—some marked with cryptic notes, most not. If ‘hundreds of kilometers’ seems a bit of a stretch, in Achim’s case it isn’t far off. If my math is correct, 80 hours of tape running at 7 ½ to 15 inches per second totals at least 75 kilometers—a pretty significant aural autobahn, even for a prolific 90-year-old.

The first epic step in preserving this sonic legacy—before age and decay rendered these delicate tapes unplayable—landed in the lap of Achim’s selfless friend Klaus Becker. For weeks on end, Klaus painstakingly spooled up one reel after another and saved to a hard drive the 2-track tapes Achim had made from 1968 until the mid-80’s on his trusty Revox A77 and B77 recorders.

A few years later, I carted home to the US the 40 or so reels that Achim had recorded in the 80’s and 90’s on an 8-channel Fostex machine. With the generous support of our dear friend Christopher Chaplin, we procured the vintage gear needed to digitize these multi-track tapes. Many shared a problem common to that era—the binding agent responsible for adhering magnetic particles to the polyester base had softened over time, rising to the surface. Upon playback, the affected tapes wound smoothly for mere moments before grinding to a sticky halt—a gummy mess of residue on the playback heads and every surface the tape had crossed. The unlikely remedy was baking them—literally placing about five reels at a time in our kitchen oven at a low temperature for half a day. (As the aroma was certainly not as enticing as the scent of marillenknoedel that wafts from the window of Achim’s lovely neighbor Cristl, my family was thrilled when the last batch was finally ‘cooked’.)

The true reward for all this effort came later—the chance to listen through this amazing trove of audio, tracing a timeline that embodies Achim’s most productive and influential years as a musician. I soon realized that labeling these tapes as ‘outtakes’ or practice sessions would be a mistake. They are nothing less than an audio diary, a visceral day-to-day chronicle of a musician in his prime. Like a loose-leaf notebook, the pages are often shuffled—tape was expensive and these reels were clearly reused countless times. Tantalizing bits of music are abruptly interrupted by an old radio program or an impromptu sing-along with Martha and their children. You get the sense that the tape was often ‘rolling’, and it captured a poignant narrative of Achim and his family’s lives, in real time.

Most of the music on 90 comes from the 2-track Revox tapes. Working with his Echolette tape delay and Farfisa organ—the equipment on which Achim recorded his beloved Selbstportrait records and much of the seminal work with Dieter Moebius and Michael Rother—the Revox tapes document the processes and sounds that continue to inspire generations of music lovers and sonic adventurers. The richness and complexity of many of these pieces belie their creation on a 2-track recorder, a result of Achim’s inventive use of the Revox and its ability to build up layers of parts by painstakingly playing back one channel of audio while superimposing another live layer, the combined audio then ‘bouncing’ over to the other channel to be recorded. A contemporary listener would be forgiven for assuming these are stereo mixes of intricate multi-track studio sessions, but for Achim, sheer ingenuity was understandably in much greater supply than money.

Curating this set—shrinking an 80-hour, decades-long autobiography in music to the constraints of just four vinyl records—was a joyful if challenging proposition. Give this much music to a dozen of Achim’s most ardent fans, and you would receive 12 very different collections—as much a testament to the breadth and variety of Achim’s legacy as the myriad ways that his music has touched listeners for a half-century. For me, the biggest hurdle was my attention span. Setting out with purpose to begin the selection process, I invariably got lost in the seductive journey Achim had preserved here. An hour or two later I’d come to my senses, remind myself of the task at hand, and start once again from the beginning. Thanks to our friends Jim Tetlow and Tony Tumminello who helped identify tracks already released elsewhere, the choices eventually narrowed.

With a pared-down collection in hand, Achim, Mareike (our tireless ally at Groenland) and I chose final candidates—the work we found most important, most appealing, most vivid. There are certainly a few surprises.

So what’s on 90? Roughly speaking, the first four sides feature the languid, contrapuntal tone poems that Achim concocted on his echo-fed Farfisa and synthesizers, often joined by an Elka Drummer One rhythm box and the occasional electric guitar. The fourth side ends with a disarming snippet, likely from Forst, Germany in the 70’s—Achim cracks jokes while his Cluster colleague Dieter Moebius mischievously reads what must be a review of one of their records. Sardonic, funny and unrehearsed, this slice of life offers a brief glimpse into a profoundly special partnership, at a remarkable time.

Side E unveils a facet of Achim's repertoire seldom explored in his published releases, but one I found particularly lovely and astonishingly forward-looking. Drone-based works were only being explored at the time in far-flung niches of the sonic universe, but Achim’s surprising forays into this realm, rich in subtlety and nuance, masterfully foreshadow by decades the journeys into ‘deep listening’ that have blossomed in recent years.

A more abstract—sometimes humorous, sometimes darker—avenue of Roedeliusmusik is traversed on side F, reminding us again that Achim’s fearless love of sound was never limited by category or style. A life is not made solely of pleasant moments, and Achim, born into a pre-war Berlin, endured more than his share of hardship and uncertainty. Thankfully, his music embraced it all.

The last record in the set follows the Roedelius family to tiny Blumau, Austria and the glorious beginnings of Achim’s lifelong love affair with the piano. With the generosity of the Alban Berg Endowment, there would finally be a piano in the house. Sharing their humble flat (where the closest running water was outside in the hallway) with a Boesendorfer grand must have felt like divine intervention. For Achim, it afforded the time and space to develop an unmatched intimacy and ease with this expressive instrument—enabling the same profound rapport that he had forged with the Farfisa and Echolette years before. The rippling, layered arpeggios in these pieces reveal an irresistible transition from the processes of Achim’s electronic past to the more idiomatic piano approach he would discover and eventually—like all Roedeliusmusik—make entirely his own.

A final note here: 90 is in no way intended as the exhaustive retrospective of the oeuvre of an important artist (this can, and should, be done in the coming years by someone more qualified than me.) The actual chronology of these pieces, and in some cases who might have collaborated with Achim on them, remain a mystery. But the historical context of this music is undeniably compelling—it doesn’t feel like hyperbole to suggest that these cascading, hypnotic cycles equal the best of contemporaries like Terry Riley, working half a world away on their own minimal masterpieces.

For now, a celebration is sufficient—the portrait of an extraordinary life at 90, narrated in beautiful, intimate, innovative music.

(Tim Story, March 2024)