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• Sep 12
• 7

Get down to the Braun sound

My OCD-propelled obsession with finding the Braun record has finally come to a conclusion. Last month I swore I remembered a techno record made from Braun appliance samples, but couldn’t find anything about it online. Well, a copy of the Braun record arrived in the mail from Objectifier Bharani Padmanabhan, and the mystery has been solved.

Braunmusic was actually an art project released in 1996 by Köln-based painter/sculptor Johannes Wohnseifer and a group of musician friends going by the name Diverse. Johannes has gone on to quite a successful art career in the 12 years since braunmusic. So what does the record sound like? Well… it sounds like 12-year-old German techno.

Here’s an MP3 track from the record (digitized from my turntable, excuse the sound quality). I think the lead synth sound is maybe sampled from a Braun world travel alarm clock? Or maybe not, who knows.

Johannes is currently traveling in Ethiopia, and emailed me: “I wasn’t a musician, I just had the idea for the record’s concept and cover. Then I asked my friends (including Thomas Schaeben and Heiko Voss) to do the music. For all of them this was their first record release. The German publisher Tropen Verlag released it.”

Thanks again to Bharani for finding a copy of this long out-of-print record, and to Johannes for letting us give away a track from it.

Now I’m free to obsess about something else…

– Gary