Sonne Statt Reagan - Joseph Beuys

We were rummaging through some storage boxes the other day when we found the 45 record "Sonne Statt Reagan" by Joseph Beuys. Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist who was born in 1921 in Krefeld in Nordrhein-Westfalen. He died in 1986

He served in the German army during World War 2 and after leaving the army he went to study at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. He was interested in painting, sculpture, poetry, performance art and social commentary. He was not a lover of the cold war and was highly critical of Ronald Reagan.
His 45 record "Sonne Statt Reagan" is a play on words. Regen means rain in German, so "Sonne Statt Reagan" means "Sun instead of Reagan or Rain".

This record is an icon of German performance art and I bought the record when it first came out in Germany for 5 Deutsche Marks. I thought I had lost it and was about to pay a princely sum to Discogs for a replacement copy. My wife saved me a lot of money.

You can hear the record on You Tube but it is not the same. Digital copies are unavailable and it is not published on Spotify. Luckily, I have an original 1982 version of the record.

You can see and hear a performance here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ1_ALxGbGk

This was New Wave performance art at its best.

The words were by Alain Thomé and the music was by Klaus Heuser. The flip side has another Heuser compostion an instrumental called Kraefte Sammeln (collect one's strength or fortify yourself) which sounds a bit like Focus - not bad.

The words of "Sonne Statt Reagan" are translated very well here:


http://www.artsconnected.org/resource/90726/sound-sonne-statt-reagan-sun-instead-of-rain

So how did it sound? Even though the record had been in the garage and the cover smells a little bit damp and mouldy it remained in excellent condition.It was lying on its side which is not the best way to store a record. I wiped it with a carbon brush and the record sounded as fresh as when I bought with just a little bit of crackle and pop on the fade out. I have digitised it but I did not apply any noise reduction.

The digitised version sounds almost exactly the same as the record so this is a tribute to modern digital sound engineering and this is why competent digital re-mastering of old master tapes produces better sounding playback than LPs or 45s. The cutting lathes for LP and 45 records cannot fully reproduce the original sound waves.  Vinyl records  and their playback equipment cannot replicate the original sound waves fully either. But,of course, brand new LPs and 45s can still sound wonderful; as does my original of "Sonne Statt Reagan".

We also found a near pristine copy of a 1982 recording by Altered Images you may have heard it - "Happy Birthday". This is not the best of music but the sound reproduction was almost perfect for an old 45. It must of been my girlfriend at the time who bought it as I cannot remember playing it. This was New Wave triviality.