Music Arcades: Lunz: Lunz Reinterpretations

I thought sometime back in 2003 or 2004 I read that Hans-Joachim Roedelius was playing his last ever gig. He was, after all, already 70 by that time. I missed that one, but was pleased to see that he was billed to play at the ICA on 5 August 2005 in his incarnation as Lunz, which is a duo of Roedelius with Tim Story.

I bought this double CD at that gig, at the same time as I got the wonderful book on Roedelius that I mentioned before. All Roedelius albums are subtly different, but this is still very recognisably a Roedelius album. I can't put my finger on Tim Story's contribution, but mostly he seems to keep tastefully out of the way.

The CD of remixes is OK, as effectively a whole disc of bonus tracks. I've only recently clocked on to Ulrich Schnauss's music, so I was interested to see that he'd done a remix and listened closely to that — I think it's one of the best tracks. There's also a remix by Adem, who adds a vocal to the track Lunz. In fact he was one of the support acts for Roedelius and Story at the gig where I got this.

While listening to all these albums day by day and year by year there's always a question in my mind, even if it's not directly spoken: will I ever listen to this again? That's what I was addressing explicitly yesterday, and arriving, sadly, that in that case the answer was probably No. It's listening to things like Roedelius that makes these decisions hard, because I want not only to listen to this album many more times, but to listen to the 40-plus Roedelius albums that I don't have yet.