DER OSTEN IST ROT

You've got to have the last track "Traeum mal wieder"! It's ABSOLUTELY essential! For me at least this is one of the best things ever recorded. It conveys the deep meditative impression better than any other music I know that when you really listen to your own body and mind, the whole world is a part of you and you are not as an individual separated from the world. Some of the used sounds speak to the deepest layers of my soul. But it's not "new age"; you'll come across more edgy parts of the world and of yourself here as well. It also opens a new direction for Holger to go on many of his later releases (although not the next one Rome remains Rome). Really, get this! Actually there are possibilities to get this track other than buying "Der Osten ist Rot"; it's also on the CD made up of the best of this album and "Rome", and Holger has lately offered a remix of it on vinyl on his website ("Dream Again"), which doesn't do any harm to the qualities of the original. Not sure whether this is still on sale.

The complaint I have about the remainder of this album is that apart from "Traeum mal wieder", it mostly sounds like toying around with ideas without really elaborating them, and some jokes. "Traeum mal wieder" is very serious, deep music, whereas everything else is rather "fun", and much more lightweight on the musical side.

It isn't all bad though. The title track is a nice experiment deconstructing the Chinese national anthem (I believe), "Das Massenmedium" ("mass media make stupid, stupid, stupid") is a joke but musically tasteful and good to listen to, and "Michy" works fairly well as an improvised minimalist experiment. Otherwise there is more stuff based on field and radio recordings and voices, some strange Holger humour, and some toy melodies. I guess that Holger tried to make "Photo Song" kind of commercial, but his musical brain is much too twisted to get such a thing done, so Photo Song is rather a somewhat skewed children's melody with some charm but hardly any commercial appeal. Again, it qualifies as "fun" but not as serious music. Of course Holger doesn't take himself all too seriously, so you can't really blame him for this, but as a music lover, you'd probably prefer to get 40 minutes of the top quality he is able to deliver than 7 1/2 minutes of stunning music and >30 minutes of toying around, even though you gotta give to him that there is quite some variety and creativity here and as a Czukay fan I still would have wanted to have the >30 minutes of experiments and jokes, had he decided to publish a "100% quality music" album at the time.