Harald Grosskopf

One-time Ash Ra Tempel keys player and Cosmic Joker Harald Grosskopf juices new life from 1984’s ‘Oceanheart’ with results running from Berlin skool techno to drug chug proto-Goa styles.

“”In 1984, four years after the release of my first solo album Synthesist on Sky Records, I wanted to produce a new solo album. At the time I was operating on the fifth floor of a former backyard factory on Graefe-Str. in Berlin Kreuzberg with my Neue Deutsche Welle Band Lilli Berlin. We’d turned the space into a small music and rehearsal studio where we set up a Tascam 8-track tape recorder, a 12- channel MM mixer that roared like hell, a Mini-Moog and a Roland Jupiter-6 synthesizer. This is where the basic recordings for Oceanheart were made. Essentially sequences and chords, which I then added piano, drums, Indian tablas and solo voices to in Christoph Franke’s (Tangerine Dream) studio in Berlin Spandau. It was then mastered on a Betamax video recorder — at that time the non-plus-ultra of modern stereo recording technique. Oceanheart was released on Sky Records in 1985. At the beginning of 2022 Gunther Buskies, owner of Bureau B label, had the inspired idea to expand the planned re-release of Oceanheart with a remix album and to call it Oceanheart Revisited.

Around the same time, I met Tobias Stock through my friend Chris Mick. Tobias, a qualified electronics engineer and musician, had put together a complex, top-class analog studio over 20 years of meticulous and passionate collecting — bringing each of the numerous component parts back into the best technical state with his own hands. There are only few studios of this kind and quality in the world and it was here, in his ‘On TAPE’ Studio, we created the analogue mixes of Oceanheart Revisited on a NAGRA 2-channel tape machine. I really enjoyed working on Oceanheart Revisited and I’d like to share this experiment with you.” –Harald Grosskopf, January 2023”