Aphrica is a collaboration album by Klaus Schulze, Rainer Bloss and Ernst Fuchs, with the painter Fuchs providing vocals. Aphrica was both released and withdrawn in 1984. Although the reason why the album was taken off the market was mainly legal (the label Inteam had "forgotten" to make a contract with Fuchs), Schulze had very little positive to say about the collaboration in retrospect: "Besides, it's an awful album, just because of that silly singing or recitation. Fuchs tries to be "serious", but he's only involuntarily funny. In Germany we have the word "peinlich" for it." The press seemed to agree: According to tip a Berlin-based magazine, "(...) due to their grandiloquent dimwittedness, the lyrics provoke only tormented laughter." (June 1984)
Hmmm, sour grapes? Klaus, I don't understand German well enough to judge how silly the words are, but presumably you knew Fuchs' reputation before you started, and, when you heard the singing and recitation, you still went ahead and put the album out. When you titled albums Audentity, Trancefer, Dig it, Miditation and En=trance, did you think you were being funny? Not feeling at all peinlich about those?
So, obviously, I bought this album in 1984, and I'd like to be positive about it in the hope of increasing its value as a collectible rarity. If you don't speak a lot of German, the singing and recitation doesn't get in the way; in fact it sits reasonably comfortably with the music. Rainer Bloss, who never gets much of the limelight, does some light and witty keyboard work on Side 1, reminding us that German synthesiser prog was at least still a cousin of jazz, if not a closer relation.
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