FRFREE ENTRY: Tapetopia GDR Underground Tapes at Rough Trade

Join us at Rough Trade Berlin on 11th February :
7pm to discover the world of ‚tapetopia: GDR
Underground Tapes 1980 – 1990.

Rough Trade Berlin
Karl-Marx-Straße 101, 12043 Berlin

The event will start with a short Book Reading by Henryk Gericke, author of „Tanz den Kommunismus“, followed by a DJ Set by Henryk and Philip Strobel, founder of Berlin record label aufnahme wiedergabe.

tapetopia vinyl and copies of the „Tanz den Kommunismus“ book will be available for purchase on the
night.

‚tapetopia‘ is a series of vinyl releases based on cassettes from East Germany’s 80s underground, particularly from the East Berlin „Mauerstadt“ music scene, featuring original layouts and track lists. For over 30 years after their initial „release“ the music on these tapes was neither available on vinyl nor CD, but they were important statements in the canon of the GDR subculture. Despite the miniscule number of original cassettes in circulation at the time many of the bands were popular in countercultural circles, a factor that made them highly suspect among the government’s own inner circles.

While the underground tape scene of the 1980s worked similarly in the two „sound systems“ that were East and West Germany, at their core they were fundamentally different. In both east and west, fans taped non-hits for a like-minded circle of friends. In the west they rejected the music that dominated the market; in the east, they simply had no concept of „the market“. Bridges between these two sonic worlds did exist, but the production conditions on both sides reflected two very different ideological
world views.