Alles ist Gut
My drummer Matt and I always arrived at rehearsals two hours before the rest of the band. We loved to jam and make noise. When we were almost ready to give a form to our improvisations, the other band members arrived, and we had to stop and focus on our more conventional songs with them. Verse-chorus-verse. The typical song structure.
The German music scene, which developed around the Berlin and Düsseldorf schools, taught us that there was not such a thing in German basements and recording studios in the 1970s. Bands like Neu!, Can, Tangerine Dream, or Cluster focused on long jam sessions and on creating new sounds rather than hits or easy-listening songs.
This is why they are considered a school. They took inspiration from the UK and US bands but transformed those influences into something different and personal. These two schools we learned to know as Krautrock/Kosmische Musik scene had completely different approaches and goals. The number of bands experimenting rapidly increased with a mix of Elektropunk and new wave, and between 1979 and 1982, even generated a new sub-scene labeled Neue Deutsche Welle by a Dutch radio DJ on a popular nationwide radio station, which was very popular among German listeners.
Post-Punk, and Synth Pop, were the leading genres among the Neue Deutsche Welle. Most bands started bringing their sound in more radical and extreme directions. One of the best examples of this transition was singer Gabriel "Gabi" Delgado-López and drummer Robert Görl, the founding members of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (in English German-American Friendship). also known as DAF.
After releasing a series of 22 improvisations in their first album Ein Produkt der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft (1979), their second album Die Kleinen und die Bösen, released the following year, introduced a more Synth oriented sound. It appears clear to me the influence these first two albums had on bands like Sonic Youth and, more recently, Liars.
The third album, Alles ist gut, changed their musical trajectory. Released in 1981, and similarly to bands like New Order, the album represents a broader transition from the fury and distortion of their earlier Elektropunk/Noise albums to a more danceable style. The synth becomes the driving force, and Robert Görl's drumming becomes more round and perfectly fits the arpeggiator's melodies. The album's songs were only based on a single sequencer-driven line, with the sequence functioning as melodic accompaniment and as a bassline and Delgado's voice.
Görl and Delgado used just a Korg MS-20 and an ARP Odyssey analog synthesizer usually driven by a Korg SQ-10 analog sequencer, creating a blend of Industrial sounds and Synth-rock.
Alles ist gut ended up selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and DAF became the fifth-biggest German-speaking group in Germany. This happened, though, also because of their move to London. They moved there, attracted by the possibilities their music could have in England and signed a record deal with independent label Mute right before the release of their second album.
The success abroad gave them even more credibility in their home country and brought them to sign a new record deal, this time with major label Virgin which released Alles ist gut and the following two albums of the band, Gold und Liebe (1981), and Für Immer (1982).
