About this item

The musician: Rudiger Lorenz was a pharmacist by trade. He produced and marketed a total of eighteen electronic music albums until his death in the year 2000. As only a few hundred copies of each were circulated, Lorenz's works remained largely unknown. This reissue will change that! The music: Southland originally released in 1984, is stylistically between the new Dusseldorf School (Ata Tak/Pyrolator) and the old Berlin School (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze). Just when you thought you had heard everything that German electronic music of the 1980s had to offer, up pops an artist who has resolutely stayed off the radar all these years, in spite of having a discography which lists no less than 18 albums. Then again, this is not so remarkable in the case of Rudiger Lorenz: The (hobby) musician completed an album almost every year from the early 1980s, beginning with limited runs of two to three hundred on cassette, switching to vinyl in 1983 and CD from 1990. His last album was released in 1998. Two years later Rudiger Lorenz died unexpectedly and far too soon.

Born in 1941, Lorenz actually got into music at a young age, although his activity at this stage was confined to playing in a beat group. But as a musically open-minded character, his record collection grew to over 10,000 discs, acquainting him early with bands like Kraftwerk, NEU!, Can and Cluster. These bands had a lasting influence on his relationship to music, guiding him towards electronica.