HARALD GROSSKOPF - Glitches Brew HARALD GROSSKOPF

The legendary Harald Grosskopf continues his long-standing relationship with Hamburg’s Bureau B with Glitches Brew, a vital new LP and the latest stage in his ongoing dialogue with electronic possibility. The titular nod to Miles Davis’ masterpiece Bitches Brew reflects Grosskopf’s sense of humour, while also hinting at the album’s underlying theme: the productive friction between man and machine.

For the uninitiated, Grosskopf’s career spans six decades of German music history. From early beat groups in Hildesheim, through Krautrock propulsion with Wallenstein, cosmic explorations alongside Ashra, and defining work with Klaus Schulze, he has consistently pushed rhythm into evolving technological contexts. His 1980 solo debut Synthesist, previously reissued on Bureau B, helped establish a sequencer-driven language that bridged kosmische tradition and modern electronic form.

Created over three to four months in his garden studio, Glitches Brew is shaped by speed and responsiveness. Grosskopf worked primarily with digital instruments this time, travelling light and favouring fast access from feeling to recording. Ideas arrive spontaneously; he works until satisfied, often reshaping sounds the next day if they fail to spark with the same intensity. What emerges is a vivid, present-tense record where human instinct and electronic process remain in constant, audible conversation. Stems are recorded in mono or stereo, passed through a Studer desk and printed to two-track, restoring weight and tactility to digital sources. Where VST synthesis can lack transient bite, analogue circuitry restores what he calls the sensation of leather, wood and metal. The signal path is humanised without surrendering to nostalgia.

Glitches Brew balances analogue intuition and digital immediacy, kosmische heritage and contemporary electronic language. It is the work of an artist still following his own ideas, still excited by sound, still testing the edges. Sixty years on from his first beat-group rehearsals, Harald Grosskopf remains what he has always been: a musician for whom rhythm is liberation, technology is possibility, and the future is something to invent again and again.