Search - Human Being :: Human Being: Live at the Zodiak (Berlin) 1968

Where do we start? Let s take summer 1968 at the Zodiak underground music club beneath 32 Hallesches Ufer in West Berlin s Kreuzberg Quarter. It was here that Human Being s uncompromisingly loud debut rattled the foundations of the Wirtschaftswunder, West Germany s post-war economic miracle, as if willing it to collapse. The tools of the 1960s American and British rock trade guitar, organ, drums were present and correct. But this wasn t the sound of The Doors or Rolling Stones. The instruments were scraped and beaten, fed through early reverb, delay and echo units, the output sounding like industrial machines gone berserk. Tune into Live at the Zodiak 1968, with the volume up to the max, and you ll know why people came away stunned by the alien weirdness of it all. Who was Human Being? A collective of non-musicians with anti-hippie black t-shirts and pre-punk defiance; Elke Lixfeld, Broderick Price, Beatrix Rief, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Boris Schaak, Verena Schirz and Christoph Sievernich plus sometime guests Norbert and Rita Eisbrenner, Werner Goetz and others. Even to the seriously hip Zodiak crowd with a cocked ear for Hendrix and Zappa imports, the Human Being experience was unlike any before it. Yet repeat listens to Live at the Zodiak 1968 tells us their 400-watt noise was charged with a human impulse. If you organize this noise, the Zodiak s co-founder Conrad Schnitzler told Roedelius, it s not just pure chaos, it can grow into music. And out of the chaos, a sense of redemption for a nation sick of the past and confused about the future... Stephen Iliffe