Nitzer Ebb – Basic Pain Procedure

I'm glad they steered away from this DAF/Bauhaus imitation with their next release, as to not merely copy others.

Sure their is much to be said for the DAF influences on display here, the instrumentation and minimalism of the production being the most relevant pointers towards the DAF influence. The delivery on the other hand tells a different story, especially Douglas McCarthy's vocal style and lyrics which appear to be very deeply marked by the influence Bauhaus would've had over the UK alternative music scene in 1983 and very obviously over the then teenage trio of Nitzer Ebb and for me it is the overriding attraction of this Nitzer Ebb audio artefact.

Buyer beware. Note that the degradation of the audio signal on the audience recording is quite extensive. I've been a big Nitzer Ebb fan for twenty years now, but this is a curiosity at best. [edit] - People buying the CD miss out on very little.

The A-side of the demo has passable quality and remains important documentation of the nascent stages of the electronic body music scene. The sound-board recording is of equal standard and a rewarding listen for hardcore fans.

Seems like a minimum of tampering was done to the recordings themselves. The background tape-hiss is steady at around -35dB and there are a lot of artifacts throughout.

Release rated 5/5 nonetheless. The effort on behalf of Pylon Records and the people who helped put this together as well as immaculate presentation makes it an essential gem. Looking forward to september then =)

amazingly this is being released shortly! Very excited to get to hear it finally... hopefully everything on this cassette will be included!

Nitzer Ebb alone should be responsible for hordes of DAF imitators (at this very early stage themselves included) that continue to lean on the very same DAF pattern to this present day - however, the duo of Bon Harris and Douglas McCarthy (at first Dave Gooday was also a member) remain a unique force which, unlike many after them, had the luck to improve DAF's legacy, providing the original with a desired hardcore update.

This very first demo cassette is typically raw and sounds too similar a flat reproduction of DAF's to be distanced from that band alone. However, a positive thing about it is, it continued exactly where DAF of the time left off towards the more disco-familiar territory (with 'First Step To Heaven').

Naive and predictable but already marking bits of sliding away from the Cologne's legendary twosome - McCarthy's vocals is powerful if not childish at times and alone informs the oncoming sound that fans will associate with as Nitzer Ebb's mid-80s finest 'funk aggression' templates ('Murderous', 'Let Your Body Learn' and of course, 'Join in the Chant').

While this tape of Nitzer's is indeed impossible to find or track down anywhere, even through Soulseek or Torrent's wider range of individual MP3 collections, it is worth a listen for the fact it is truly the earliest Nitzer ever got into music. The sound of the tape is satisfactory albeit it betrays a typical demo of the time, the voices, drums, dub effects and synths fight between each other respectively - among the studio tracks taken, one is significant of surviving a transfer onto vinyl ('Crane', in a slightly different version, of course) while among the standout, predominantly DAF-esque tracks, 'The Pass' is a chilling, unique example of what Nitzer Ebb would become in their later days.